COOLANT OPTIONS FOR A WATER-COOLED REACTOR WITH A HARD NEUTRON SPECTRUM

摘要

A thorium-plutonium-fueled, water-cooled reactor with hard neutron spectrum has been analyzedrnby using the Monte Carlo (MC) burn-up code MCBURN developed at BNL. Preliminaryrnanalyses have shown that thorium fertile fuel has better neutronics characteristics than U-238.rnReasonable computer time is required to analyze, by the MC method, a whole reactor consistingrnof many lattice cells. It is demonstrated that the MCBURN code can be a useful tool for arnreactor with a complicated geometry. The application of the MC method to RELAP and PARCSrncode systems to analyze the kinetic behavior in the case of an accident is discussed.