The United States' fleet of Light Water Reactors (LWRs) produces a large amount of spent fuel
each year; all of which is presently intended to be stored in a fuel repository for disposal. As these
LWRs continue to operate and more are built to match the increasing demand for electricity, the
required capacity for these repositories grows. Georgia Tech's Subcritical Advanced Burner Reactor
(SABR) has been designed to reduce the capacity requirements for these repositories and thereby
help close the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle by burning the long-lived transuranics in spent nuclear
fuel. SABR's design is based heavily off of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).
It is important to understand whether the SABR design retains the passive safety characteristics
of the IFR. A full safety analysis of SABR's transient response to various possible accident scenarios
needs to be performed to determine this. However, before this safety analysis can be performed, it is
imperative to model all components of the reactivity feedback mechanism in SABR. The purpose of
this work is to develop a calculational model for the fuel bowing reactivity coefficients that can be used
in SABR's future safety analysis. This thesis discusses background on fuel bowing and other reactivity
coefficients, the history of the IFR, the design of SABR, describes the method that was developed for
calculating fuel bowing reactivity coefficients and its validation, and presents an example of a fuel
bowing reactivity calculation for SABR.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/50295 |
| Date | 13 January 2014 |
| Creators | Bopp, Andrew T. |
| Contributors | Stacey, Weston M. |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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