1982•OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information)Requires access
Internal fuel motion in annular fuel as an inherent safety shutdown mechanism during hypothetical LMFBR accidents
D.E. Smith, Farrel J. Martin, Andrew Padilla, Alan E. Waltar
Open publisher page 1 citations
Abstract
It has been postulated that the use of annular fuel would provide an inherent safety shutdown mechanism during hypothetical LMFBR accidents by providing a pathway for molten fuel to be ejected from the active core region to the fission gas plenum. In this paper, a preliminary assessment of the whole-core reactivity consequences of internal fuel motion in annular fuel during hypothetical transient overpower accidents was performed using the MELT-IIIB/FUMO-E code. It was concluded that internal fuel relocation is an effective inherent safety shutdown mechanism for high reactivity ramp rates on the order of 3$/s. Improvement of the transient fission gas release modeling might expand the range of effectivenwss to substantially lower reactivity ramp rates.