Neutron flux distribution and conversion ratio of Critical Experiment Device for molten salt reactor research

摘要

Critical Experiment Device (cold) was established for research on the physics characteristics of Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) in 1970s, at Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, China. Neutron flux distribution was measured for different core structures and the conversion ratio of the core containing thorium fuel was determined on the basis of the preliminary criticality experiments. The purpose of this work is to compare the calculated flux distribution and thorium-uranium conversion ratio with the measured results in this device. Calculations were accomplished by using MCNP5 code with nuclear data from ENDF/B-VILO, ENDF/13-V11.1, JEFF 3.2, JENDL 4.0, CENDL 3.1 and ROSFOND 2010 libraries. The results show that the calculated results are in good agreements with the experimental data. Findings in this work have a great significance to the design and benchmark verification of a cold MSR. However, more hot experiments are needed to study the nuclear properties of the liquid fuel MSR. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.