Thorium utilization in a pebble bed reactor
Loading...
Date
2000-10
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Turkish Atomic Energy Authority
Abstract
Thorium reserves in the earth's crust are much more than those of uranium, which today
measure about 1.5 million tonnes of reasonably assured resources, plus 3 million tonnes of
estimated additional resources. These large amount of thorium reserves, also available in Turkey
encourages to focus on the utilization of thorium.
The most remarkable applications of the use of thorium have been in high temperature reactors.
The high temperature pebble bed reactor, which has been chosen as the basis for this study, is a
close approximation of the thorium utilizing German reactor THTR. Pebble bed reactors have
some unique features which are suitable to bum thorium, (i) The fuel is loaded in the form of
coated particles, which are embedded in the graphite matrix of the fuel pebbles, allowing
exceptionally high heavy metal bumups; and (ii) the continuous (on-line) fuel loading allows a
high utlization factor.
The criticality search of the pebble bed reactor is computed by the use of the SCALE4.4 code,
CSASIX and KENOVa modules. And the in-core fuel management is computed via SCALE4.4
code, ORIGEN-S module.
Description
I. Avrasya Nükleer Bilimler ve Uygulamaları Konferansı : 23-27 Ekim 2000. İzmir, Türkiye.
Keywords
Thorium, Toryum, Pebble bed reactor, Çakıl yataklı reaktör
Citation
Çeçen, Y., Tombakoğlu, M., Sarıkaya, B. (2000). Thorium utilization in a pebble bed reactor. I. Eurasia Conference on Nuclear Science and Its Application, Presentations, Vol 1, (s. 348-353). 23-27 October 2000. İzmir, Turkey.