UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS ACCELERATOR DRIVEN SUBCRITICAL EXPERIMENTS

摘要

The Texas phase of the Reactor-AcceleratorrnCoupling Experiment (RACE) was completed inrnMarch 2006. The experiment demonstrated thernfeasibility of operating a TRIGA reactor in arnsubcritical configuration driven to significant powerrnby an electron LINAC neutron source. The pulsingrnLINAC and various core configurations providedrnseveral opportunities to evaluate the subcritical levelrnof the reactor and compare measurements torncalculated values. Valuable benchmarking of thernoriginal core models was performed as a result of thernRACE project which will be used to performrnadditional thermal and hydraulic safety analysis ofrnthe critical and subcritical TRIGA reactor. The finalrnresult of the experiments met the original goals of thernDOE supported feasibility project but was unable tornreach the temperature feedback regime of thernsubcritical system due to neutron source location andrnLINAC power limitations. Performance data wasrnacquired during a limited campaign due to resourcernlimitations but clearly shows that a high powerrnaccelerator-driven subcritical transmutationrndemonstration project is achievable.