Impacts of an ATF cladding on neutronic performances of the soluble-boron-free ATOM core

Abstract

This article is mainly concerned with the impacts of various accident tolerant fuel (ATF) claddings on neutronics performances of a soluble-boron-free (SBF) small modular reactor (SMR) core. There are two ATF cladding concepts which are evaluated here: (a) coating Zircaloy-4 cladding with a thin layer of Cr or Cr alloys; (b) high-strength and oxidation-resistant claddings: stainless steel and FeCrAl. Comparisons between Zircaloy-4 and ATF claddings are done in terms of the cycle length, discharge burnup, pin peaking factor (PPF), burnup reactivity, and spectral change. Moreover, the ATF claddings are also compared in view of the rim effect, neutron absorption by the cladding and He production in the cladding. In addition, a linear reactivity model is used to estimate the required U-235 enrichment so that the cycle length with ATF claddings should be equivalent to that with the reference Zircaloy-4 case. Furthermore, impacts of a selected ATF cladding are then analyzed in a centrally shielded burnable absorber (CSBA)-loaded FA in terms of PPF, burnup reactivity, and spectral change. Based on the CSBA-loaded FA analysis, a minor modification of burnable absorber loading strategy in the SBF autonomous transportable on-demand reactor module core is proposed to adopt the selected ATF cladding without compromising the core performance. The lattice calculations are done using the Monte Carlo Serpent 2 code with the ENDF/B-VII.1 nuclear library, while the 3-D multi-physics core calculations are performed using a Monte Carlo-diffusion hybrid procedure.