Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Nuclear reactor for power production which can directly consume natural Uranium has some advantages, e.g., no necessity to bult enrichment plant which may drive controversy such as in the case of Iran. CANDLE and Modified CANDLE type reactors are an example of Nuclear Power plant which can directly consume natural Uranium in its fuel cycle. In this study the preliminary analysis of start-up process of modified CANDLE burn-up scheme based long life Pb-Bi Cooled Fast Reactors has been performed. The basic strategy is to put different plutonium content in each core regions by considering its equilibrium plutonium content in each region. The system then is started as a Modified CANDLE reactor system until relatively stable cycle obtained. The calculation has been done by using SLAROM, SRAC, and FI-ITB CH1 system codes. Two dimensional multi-group diffusion and burn-up calculation has been adopted during simulation. As results, the start-up scheme of several Modified CANDLE core with power level of 1150-1350 MWt have been performed. In this case LWR plutonium is used to initiate the MCANDLE reactors. The simulation results show that the system can work well with maximum excess reactivity of 3% dk/k
Keywords: Breeding, Burning, Burn-Up Level, Iterative Calculation, Plutonium Content, Shuffling Strategy