Final Report on Utilization of TRU TRISO Fuel as Applied to HTR Systems Part II: Prismatic Reactor Cross Section Generation

摘要

In Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTRs), the long mean-free-path and large migration area of neutrons leads to spectral influences between fuel and reflector zones over long distances. This presents significant challenges to the validity of the classic two-step approach of cross section preparation wherein infinite lattice transport calculations are performed on relatively small physical domains (e.g. single assembly) in order to compute homogenized few-group cross sections for whole core analysis. Effects of the inner and outer reflectors challenge the classical two-step approach, while burnable poison locations affect neighboring assemblies as well. Use of transuranics-only (TRU) Deep Burn fuel in a prismatic VHTR (DB-VHTR) presents the additional challenge of producing vastly different neutron spectra between fresh and burned fuel.