UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS ACCELERATOR DRIVEN SUBCRITICAL EXPERIMENTS

摘要

The Texas phase of the Reactor-Accelerator Coupling Experiment (RACE) was completed in March 2006. The experiment demonstrated the feasibility of operating a TRIGA reactor in a subcritical configuration driven to significant power by an electron LINAC neutron source. The pulsing LINAC and various core configurations provided several opportunities to evaluate the subcritical level of the reactor and compare measurements to calculated values. Valuable benchmarking of the original core models was performed as a result of the RACE project which will be used to perform additional thermal and hydraulic safety analysis of the critical and subcritical TRIGA reactor. The final result of the experiments met the original goals of the DOE supported feasibility project but was unable to reach the temperature feedback regime of the subcritical system due to neutron source location and LINAC power limitations. Performance data was acquired during a limited campaign due to resource limitations but clearly shows that a high power accelerator-driven subcritical transmutation demonstration project is achievable.