HOMOGENEOUS SLOWPOKE REACTOR FOR THE PRODUCTION OF RADIO-ISOTOPE A FEASIBILITY STUDY

摘要

The purpose of this research is to study the feasibility of replacing the actual heterogeneous fuel core of the present SLOWPOKE-2 by a reservoir containing a homogeneous fuel for the production of Mo-99. The study looked at three items: by using the MCNP Monte Carlo reactor calculation code, develop a series of parameters required for an homogeneous fuel and evaluate the uranyl sulfate concentration of the aqueous solution fuel in order to keep a similar excess reactivity; verify if the homogeneous reactor will retain its inherent safety attributes; and with the new dimensions and geometry of the fuel core, observe whether natural convection can still effectively cool the reactor using the modeling software FEMLAB~(~R). It was found that it is indeed feasible to modify the SLOWPOKE-2 reactor for a homogeneous reactor using a solution of uranyl sulfate and water.