Thermal hydraulic design of an accelerator driven subcritical system for burning minor actinides

Adam Kraus, Yan Cao, Elia Merzari, Yousry Gohar

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

An Accelerator-Driven Subcritical (ADS) system was developed at Argonne National Laboratory to dispose of the minor actinides (MAs) of the current United States spent nuclear fuel inventory. A 25 MW accelerator beam power delivered by 1 GeV protons is used to generate the neutron source, and the system is designed such that keff of the subcritical system is 0.98. The fuel is a mobile slurry of MAs using liquid lead carrier and the coolant is also liquid lead. HT-9 ferritic steel is used as the primary structural material. The main thermal hydraulic constraints are a 600 °C steel surface temperature and a lead-steel surface velocity limit of 3 m/s to minimize structural concerns. Two concepts were investigated, namely a preliminary “inverted bundle” design, with a homogeneous fuel around the beam target with a large number of coolant tubes inserted into it, and an improved “bundle” design which instead features the fuel inside the tubes. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses were performed utilizing detailed heating profiles in the fuel, structure, and coolant in order to configure the system. Extensive iterations were performed between the neutronics and the thermal hydraulics analyses in order to optimize the tube sizes and the tube spacing such that the design criteria were successfully met throughout the system.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages220-233
Number of pages14
StatePublished - Jan 1 2019
Event18th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics, NURETH 2019 - Portland, United States
Duration: Aug 18 2019Aug 23 2019

Conference

Conference18th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics, NURETH 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period8/18/198/23/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Nuclear Energy and Engineering
  • Instrumentation

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