An Advanced Core Design for a Soluble-Boron-Free Small Modular Reactor ATOM with Centrally-Shielded Burnable Absorber

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A complete solution for a soluble-boron-free (SBF) small modular reactor (SMR) is pursued with a newburnable absorber concept, namely centrally-shielded burnable absorber (CSBA). Neutronic flexibility ofthe CSBA design has been discussed with fuel assembly (FA) analyses. Major design parameters and goalsof the SBF SMR are discussed in view of the reactor core design and three CSBA designs are introduced toachieve both a very low burnup reactivity swing (BRS) and minimal residual reactivity of the CSBA. It isdemonstrated that the core achieves a long cycle length (~37 months) and high burnup (~30 GWd/tU),while the BRS is only about 1100 pcm and the radial power distribution is rather flat. This research alsointroduces a supplementary reactivity control mechanism using stainless steel as mechanical shim (MS)rod to obtain the criticality during normal operation. A further analysis is performed to investigate thelocal power peaking of the CSBA-loaded FA at MS-rodded condition. Moreover, a simple B4C-basedcontrol rod arrangement is proposed to assure a sufficient shutdown margin even at the cold-zero-powercondition. All calculations in this neutronic-thermal hydraulic coupled investigation of the 3D SBF SMRcore are completed by a two-step Monte Carlo-diffusion hybrid methodology

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