Abstract :
The gas turbine-modular helium reactor coupled to the deep burn in-core fuel management strategy offers the extraordinary capability to incinerate over 50% of the initial inventory of fissile material. This extraordinary feature, coming from an advanced and well tested fuel element design, which takes advantage of the TRISO particles technology, is maintained while the reactor is loaded with the most different types of fuels. In the present work, we assumed the reactor operating at the equilibrium of the fuel composition, obtained by a 6 years irradiation of light water reactor waste, and we investigated the effects of the introduction of the burnable poison and the control rods; we equipped the core with all the three types of control rods: operational, startup and shutdown ones. We employed as burnable poison natural erbium, due to the 167Er increasing neutron capture microscopic cross-section in the energy range where the neutron spectrum exhibits the thermal peak; in addition, we utilized boron carbide, with 90% enrichment in 10B, as the absorption material of the control rods. Concerning the burnable poison studies, we focused on the keff value, the 167Er mass during burnup, the influence of modifying the radius of the BISO particles kernel and the fuel and moderator coefficients of temperature. Concerning the control rods studies, we investigated the reactivity worth, the changes in the neutron flux profile due to a partial insertion, the influence of modifying the radius of the BISO particles kernel and the βeff, at the beginning of the operation.
