Neutronic conceptual design of Tehran Research Reactor using tubular fuel

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of using fuel with annular geometry (Tubular) in Tehran research reactor (TRR) from a neutronic perspective. The use of annular fuels requires less fuel load due to higher flux generation and higher reactivity. It is noteworthy that one of the most important advantages of this type of fuel is the creation of an area in the center of the fuel complex for irradiation of materials and production of radiopharmaceuticals. Therefore, in the TRR, a new fuel with annular geometry has been adopted to replace the current fuel with cubic geometry. This fuel is similar to TRR fuel in terms of materials. For this purpose, the neutron conditions of the core are simulated using MCNPX2.7 and WIMS-CITATION codes. Then the obtained results from these codes were compared with the SAR results of the TRR. The obtained results in this paper show that to achieve the reactivity equivalent to the first core of the TRR, the critical mass of the tubular core fuel is up to 17% less than the critical mass of the first core fuel. On the other hand, using annular fuel, the neutron flux in the radiation channels increases up to about 14%. Also, according to the results of this study, the proposed tubular core, a core with an arrangement of 16 and at least 8 packages of 6 control rods are needed to achieve safety standards.

Keywords

• tubular fuel
• tehran research reactor
• neutronic parameters
• mcnpx2.7
• wims-citation