Milestone 2.1 Report: Demonstration of SaltProc
| Main Authors: | Andrei Rykhlevskii, Kathryn Huff |
|---|---|
| Format: | Report Journal |
| Bahasa: | eng |
| Terbitan: |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, 2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/3355649 |
Daftar Isi:
- The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is engaged in work to develop a fuel processing system that enables load-following in Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), an important ability that allows nuclear power plants to ramp electricity production up or down to meet changing electricity demand. Nuclear reactions in MSRs produce unwanted byproducts (such as xenon and krypton) that can adversely affect power production. In steady, baseload operation, these byproducts form and decay at the same rate. When electricity production is ramped down, however, the byproducts start to be produced at a greater rate than they decay, leading to a buildup within the reactor. When power production must be once again increased, the response rate is slowed by the time needed for the byproducts to reach their equilibrium level (determined by the radioactive decay half-life, which is on the order of hours). Thus, buildup of these unwanted byproducts resulting from ramping down inhibit proper load following for molten salt reactors. Fortunately, MSRs transport fuel in a flowing molten salt fuel loop, which means that a section of the reactor, outside the core, can be leveraged for fuel processing and "cleanup." The team will determine the feasibility of removal of these unwanted byproducts and de- sign a fuel reprocessing system, removing a major barrier to commercialization for molten salt reactors. Toward this work, we initiated the Fuel Cycle Simulation task (Task 2) in August 2018 to more realistically model the online reprocessing system of the Transatomic Power (TAP) MSR. A Python toolkit, SaltProc v0.1 [1–3], was developed to represent the simplified online fuel salt processing of a Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR). More recently, an advanced SaltProc version (SaltProc v0.2) was developed to generically simulate complex molten salt fuel reprocessing systems, including the TAP system, incorporating user-parametrized components into the fuel salt processing design. This report summarizes the progress we have made towards milestone M2.1: Demonstrate SaltProc and the steps toward the subsequent Task 2 objectives.
- This research is being performed using funding received from the Department of Energy ARPA-E MEITNER Program (award DE-AR0000983) and the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications.