Thermal-hydraulic Design Features of Transportable Fluoride-salt-cooled High-temperature Reactor

摘要

There is a potential small reactor market for Antarctic bases, remote mining sites, container ships, military bases and other off-grid applications. In many cases, it is desirable that the reactor has a compact design and can be easily transportable by a truck, or train or an airplane. The cost of electricity and heat from conventional sources for remote locations is often very high and therefore a compact nuclear reactor design is an attractive option in spite of higher capital cost per kW than a conventional nuclear reactor. The Fluoride-salt-cooled High temperature Reactor (FHR) is an advanced reactor concept, which uses a low-pressure liquid salt coolant and high-temperature coated particle fuel. A more compact core configuration can be achieved with the FHR technology. A conceptual design of 20 MWth compact Transportable FHR (TFHR) with 18-month one-through fuel cycle is on-going at MIT. The preliminary neutronic design features of TFHR have been presented in Ref. Different power profiles at different operation stage, i.e. beginning of life (BOL), end of life (EOL), have been quantitively determined. This paper aims to evaluate the system operation safety and provide a licensing basis, emphasis being placed on the thermal-hydraulic features of the TFHR.