The Effect of Neutron Energy Spectrum on Actinide Management in High Temperature Reactors

Actinides play an important role in performance improvement and safety consideration of new type of nuclear fuels such as TRISO particle fuels in prismatic or pebble bed type of gas cooled high temperature reactors (HTR). One of the most important advantages of HTR with current core design capability is to limit the production of U, Pu, and other actinides, and the ability of burning weapon/reactor grade actinides by Deep Burn transmutation without permitting recovery. However, actinide depletion in fuel pebbles is directly related to neutron energy spectrum. In this respect, this study is aimed to find out the effect of neutron energy spectrum on actinide production/consumption and to calculate the composition of discharged fuel under various core configurations. The neutron transport calculations for group fluxes based on 44 group neutron energy cross section library is accomplished by a neutron transport code, SERPENT. The analysis indicates promising performance improvement on actinide management in HTR.