Proliferation Resistance Assessment of Aqueous Homogeneous Solution Reactor for Medical Isotope Production

摘要

Aqueous homogeneous reactor (AHR) has several benefits to be used to produce medical isotopes such as ~(99)Mo, ~(90)Sr, ~(131)I and other fission products. Isotopes as fission products can be direct extracted from the fuel solution after several days of operation. Otherwise AHR has inherent safety characteristics with very large negative reactivity feedback. Assessment in this work was conducted on the AHR with uranyl nitrate solution type AHR with enrichment 19.75% (LEU). Several fissile materials produced by the end of cycle (EOC) were calculated using deterministic method and Monte Carlo Method. The calculation results are used to evaluate the grade of proliferation resistance. The results show, that the consumption of ~(235)U by small burnup power 50 kW is 0.0167% per week. The buildup of plutonium increases proportionally to the burnup time. Total of plutonium buildup in 4 weeks operation is 0.102 g below the significant quantity defined by IAEA. The use of small AHR strengthened by advanced safeguards technologies may improve the proliferation resistance in medical isotope production.