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Preliminary Analysis of Basic Reactor Physics of the Dual Fluid Reactor Concept
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The Dual Fluid Reactor is a novel fast nuclear reactor concept invented by the IFK based on the Generation IV Molten Salt Reactor and the Liquid Metal Cooled Reactor. Since there are attractive features mentioned in this design, the main task of this paper is to verify the model of the whole reactor based on this concept. For this purpose several calculations are presented, including steady state calculations, sensitivity calculations with regard to the nuclide cross sections, the temperature and geometry coefficient of keff as well as the burnup calculation. The Monte Carlo calculation codes MCNP, SERPENT and SCALE are used for the analysis.
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... The fuel of DFR was chosen as actinide trichlorides with a very high temperature at around 1000 • C without including any carrier salt such as LiCl or NaCl [17]. Recently, a preliminary study on the design of DFR concept was done by using several Monte Carlo codes [18], in which a 3 GW t reactor was considered for breeding plutonium, and the breeding ratio was 1.06 with the burnup of 20 GWd/tHM. ...
... The DFR concepts in refs. [17,18] are "critical" reactors for the energy production or the breeding of plutonium. In contrast to these original critical DFR concepts, if a "subcritical" DFR core is designed to be driven by an accelerator, the core can have fuels with a higher fraction of MA. ...
... Two liquids (LBE and molten salt) circulate separately in the core as a coolant and a fuel. The geometries of the active core and reflectors are taken from JAEA-proposed 800 MW t ADS [4], and those of the fuel pipes are taken from the DFR designs [17,18]. ...
An accelerator-driven subcritical dual fluid reactor (AD-DFR), which is a hybrid core operated by a high power accelerator, is designed for the transmutation of minor actinides. The subcritical core is dual in the sense that a lead-bismuth-eutectic-cooled fast reactor (LFR) is combined with a molten salt reactor (MSR). Thus, the core has two loops: one for the liquid metal coolant and the other for the molten salt fuel. The combination of LFR and MSR can take advantages of both reactor types. A subcritical core allows for loading a high fraction of minor actinides in fuels. An 800MW_t AD-DFR can transmute minor actinides approximately 120kg/year with only the maximum beam power of 13MW.
... The original idea and the design description of the Dual Fluid Reactor (DFR) can be found in the work of the researchers at the Institute for Solid State Nuclear Physics (IFK) (Huke et al., 2015;Hukeet al., 2017), where the difference between the DFR and other liquid salt or liquid-metal coolant reactors is also introduced. A series of studies covering the neutronic physics, sensitivity performance, coupled calculations, emergency drain tank estimation, depletion as well as preliminary thermal-hydraulic simulations can be found in references (Wang et al., 2015(Wang et al., , 2017aWang, 2016;Wang and Macian, 2017), in which some basic reactor physics are also verified for the DFR concept. The studied subject in this article and other mentioned researches is limited to the snapshot of the design established in reference (Wang et al., 2015). ...
... A series of studies covering the neutronic physics, sensitivity performance, coupled calculations, emergency drain tank estimation, depletion as well as preliminary thermal-hydraulic simulations can be found in references (Wang et al., 2015(Wang et al., , 2017aWang, 2016;Wang and Macian, 2017), in which some basic reactor physics are also verified for the DFR concept. The studied subject in this article and other mentioned researches is limited to the snapshot of the design established in reference (Wang et al., 2015). Therefore, the features of the concept in this article describe the design used in (Wang et al., 2015(Wang et al., , 2017aWang, 2016;Wang and Macian, 2017) and have nothing to do with the new developed variants of the DFR: DFR/s and DFR/m (Huke et al., 2015). ...
... The studied subject in this article and other mentioned researches is limited to the snapshot of the design established in reference (Wang et al., 2015). Therefore, the features of the concept in this article describe the design used in (Wang et al., 2015(Wang et al., , 2017aWang, 2016;Wang and Macian, 2017) and have nothing to do with the new developed variants of the DFR: DFR/s and DFR/m (Huke et al., 2015). This article is modified from a presented conference paper in NURETH-2017 (Wang et al., 2017b). ...
This article focuses on the validation of the basic design of the distribution zone of the Dual Fluid Reactor (DFR), which is based on the Generation IV Molten-Salt Reactor concept and the Liquid-Metal Cooled Reactor. The distribution zone located under the core joins the core and input pipes of both fluids. On the top of the core, another distribution zone specified for output is also symmetrically set up; however it will not be mentioned in the paper. This distribution zone partitions the inlet flow of the salt, determines the pressure and velocity distribution of the core inlet and influences the neutronic behaviors in the core. This article uses COMSOL as the tool to develop models and to study the pressure and velocity differences of fuel salt and coolant lead in the “original” and “alternative” configurations/designs of the distribution zone in the DFR concept. COMSOL is also used to determine the initial/boundary conditions of configuration variations of the distribution zone by hydraulic modelling and calculations. The simulation results are analyzed and the optimized design is delivered.
... This meant that the geometries had to be estimated based on engineering practices. For DFR-3G, the geometry data (Tables 2 and 3), which was specified (Huke et al., 2015), was used and verified (Wang and Macian, 2018), as well as the neutronic data (Table 4 and other design data (Wang et al., 2015), without specific notations. The DFR-250 M data was collected from the work of He (2016) and (2019). ...
... With the calculated neutronic data, the accurate composition of the fuel salts was irrelevant, which could be found in the work of Wang et al. (2015) for U-Pu salt and TRU salt (Brovchenko et al., 2013). The physiochemical properties of the fuel salts and liquid lead for the thermal-hydraulic coupling are provided in Table 6 (Wang, 2017;Brovchenko et al., 2013). ...
The dual-fluid reactor (DFR) has been introduced into the nuclear community as a completely new concept for molten salt fast reactors (MSFRs). It has provided possibilities of having a reactor with inherent safety features, high fuel utility, fuel breeding, high efficiency, compact structures, online refueling, actinides burning, and minimum waste. DFR uses molten uranium–plutonium trichloride (UCl3 + PuCl3 [UPu]) as the default fuel salt and transuranium (TRU) fuel salt as the optional fuel salt. These reactors adopt liquid lead as the coolant in the reactor core. The fuel salt goes into a pyro-processing unit (PPU) for fuel re-freshening, and the liquid lead goes into a heat exchanger where it is cooled by a secondary gas coolant, which could be helium or super-critical carbon dioxide (sCO2). In this study, the system dynamics and transients of a DFR with 3000 MW (DFR3G) and 250 MW (DFR250M) are investigated. For this purpose, a model with three one-dimensional nodalized loops coupled with point-kinetic neutron dynamics is constructed based on the heat balance equations to investigate the system responses to the changes of various boundary conditions. The calculation provides a preview of the transient behavior of the DFR system, and the analysis is provided from a reactor safety point of view. The conclusion discusses the research and development status of the DFR for future improvements.
... The original idea and the design description of the Dual Fluid Reactor (DFR) can be found in the work of the researchers at IFK [3], where the difference between the DFR and other liquid salt or liquid-metal cooled reactors is also introduced. A series of studies covering the neutronic physics, sensitivity performance, coupled calculations, emergency drain tank estimation, depletion as well as thermal-hydraulic simulations can be found in the literatures [4][5][6][7][8][9], in which the basic neutronic design of the DFR concept has been verified. The following paragraphs will recall the most important features of the DFR to help understanding the new calculation and results. ...
... In the DFR design two kinds of fuel salts are considered, which are the mixture of UCl 3 and PuCl 3 (U-Pu) and transuranium mixture (TRU). The detailed compositions of these two fuel salt options can be found in references [4,6]. The percentage of Thorium in the TRU fuel salt is fixed at 14.75% at the mean temperature of 973K for DFR as calculated in the given reference. ...
Dual Fluid Reactor is a molten salt fast reactor developed by IFK (Institute of Solid-Physics) in Berlin based on the Generation IV Molten-Salt Reactor (MSR) concept and the Liquid-Metal Cooled Reactor (SFR, LFR). Without control rods, DFR is given hope to react and take steps to the change of opera-tion conditions automatically by its inertial negative temperature feedback. Since fuel salt and coolant lead are both liquid, the circulation of each liquid is considered capable to adjust operational parame-ters. This work addresses the analysis focusing on the design of the emergency drain tank system, a variation that proposed by the DFR team. In order to shut down the reactor without introducing a cold slug, a large positive reactivity change due to the sudden reduction of the fuel temperature, the DFR uses the experience in the MSRE project for reference. Melting fuse plugs, which were already proved effective in the early MSRE project, blocks off this system and the core. The analytical drainage will be performed in this work, supporting further simulations and validations of this subject for the DFR concept as well as for other MSRs.
... Differing from Taube's design, the high volumetric heat capacity of the liquid lead enables a significant heat removal capability and, thus, allows operation with a much higher power density than that of conventional reactors. A series of studies covering the neutronic characteristics, sensitivity performance, coupled calculations, emergency drain tank estimation, depletion as well as hydraulic simulations can be found in references [5][6][7][8][9][10]. It has to be noticed that previous studies on the DFR focused mainly on a large type of reactor design with a thermal power of 3 GW. ...
The Small Modular Dual Fluid Reactor (SMDFR) is a novel molten salt reactor based on the dual fluid reactor concept, which employs molten salt as fuel and liquid lead/lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) as coolant. A unique design of this reactor is the distribution zone, which locates under the core and joins the core region with the inlet pipes of molten salt and coolant. Since the distribution zone has a major influence on the heat removal capacity in the core region, the thermal hydraulics characteristics of the distribution zone have to be investigated. This paper focuses on the thermal hydraulics analysis of the distribution zone, which is conducted by the numerical simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics with the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) module and the Heat Transfer module. The energy loss and heat exchange in the distribution zone are also quantitatively analyzed. The velocity and temperature distributions of both molten salt and coolant at the outlet of the distribution zone, as inlet of the core region, are produced. It can be observed that the outlet velocity profiles are proportional in magnitude to the inlet velocity ones with a similar shape. In addition, the results show that the heat transfer in the center region is enhanced due to the velocity distribution, which could compensate the power peak and flatten the temperature distribution for a higher power density.
... This includes a very strong negative temperature feedback coefficient. The calculated temperature feedback coefficient for the DFR is about -40 pcm/K (Wang et al., 2015). ...
The Dual Fluid Reactor (DFR) is a fast reactor concept proposed by the Institute of Solid-state- and Nuclear physics (IFK) in Berlin. The design of DFR aims to combine the GenIV Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) and the Liquid-Metal Cooled Reactor (SFR, LFR), which means that the molten-salt fuel is no more used as coolant while the heat is removed in a separate loop by liquid lead, to improve these two concepts. Without control rods, DFR is given hope to react and take steps to the change of operation conditions automatically by its inertial negative temperature feedback. Since fuel and coolant are both liquid, the circulation speed of each liquid is considered capable to adjust operational parameters for DFR. The original design of a 3000MWth (Wang, 2017) and a downscaled version of 500MWth (He, 2016) were analyzed in the aspects of reactor physics and thermal-hydraulics. For the practical purpose, this paper has proposed a small modular version of the DFR, which has power output of 2MWth. The reactor with such power level is expected in various applications. Therefore, it is necessary to perform the more explicit analysis on the design than the previous ones. The analysis focuses on the neutronic calculations with the default fuel salt of U-Pu mixture under steady state conditions.
... This includes a very strong negative temperature feedback coefficient. The calculated temperature feedback coefficient for the DFR is about -40 pcm/K (Wang et al., 2015). ...
The Dual Fluid Reactor (DFR) is a fast reactor concept proposed by the Institute of Solid-state-and Nuclear physics (IFK) in Berlin. The design of DFR aims to combine the Gen-IV Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) and the Liquid-Metal Cooled Reactor (SFR, LFR), which means that the molten-salt fuel is no more used as coolant while the heat is removed in a separate loop by liquid lead, to improve these two concepts. Without control rods, DFR is given hope to react and take steps to the change of operation conditions automatically by its inertial negative temperature feedback. Since fuel and coolant are both liquid, the circulation speed of each liquid is considered capable to adjust operational parameters for DFR. The original design of a 3000MWth (Wang, 2017) and a downscaled version of 500MWth (He, 2016) were analyzed in the aspects of reactor physics and thermal-hydraulics. For the practical purpose, this paper has proposed a small modular version of the DFR, which has power output of 2MWth. The reactor with such power level is expected in various applications. Therefore, it is necessary to perform the more explicit analysis on the design than the previous ones. The analysis focuses on the neutronic calculations with the default fuel salt of U-Pu mixture under steady state conditions.
双流熔盐堆是由位于德国柏林的固体物理研究所提出的基于第四代反应堆概念熔盐堆与液态金属冷却堆的一种熔盐快中子反应堆。该反应堆使用熔盐作为燃料，熔融态铅作为冷却剂。这篇文章旨在将双流熔盐堆这一新概念堆型进行介绍，并将对这一堆型从2012年至2017年的研究成果加以介绍。这些研究包括静态中子物理计算、温度与功率分布计算、燃耗计算、稳态热工水力计算、系统瞬态分析以及分配区水力学计算等，建立了双流熔盐堆的基础模型并对这些模型在各种情况下进行了分析。分析结果表明，尽管有大量的细节尚需要进一步研究，双流熔盐堆已经表现出了进一步研究的价值。
The Dual Fluid Reactor is a molten salt fast reactor developed by Institut fuer Festkoerper-Kernphysik in Berlin, Germany, based on the Gen-IV Molten-Salt Reactor and the Liquid-Metal Cooled Reactor concepts. The reactor utilizes molten salt as the fuel and uses molten lead as the coolant. This paper will introduce the molten salt reactor concept as well as the previous researches from 2012 to 2017. The researches include calculations of the static neutron physics, temperature and power distribution, burn-up calculation, thermal-hydraulic in the steady state, transient behavior of the system and the hydraulic of the distribution zone and so on. The researches have established the fundamental models of the DFR concept and provided preliminary analysis of the models. The results reveal that, though there are still details about the features of the DFR to be investigated, the DFR has shown the value of the further studies.
This primer presents examples in the application of the SCALE/TSUNAMI tools to generate k{sub eff} sensitivity data for one- and three-dimensional models using TSUNAMI-1D and -3D and to examine uncertainties in the computed k{sub eff} values due to uncertainties in the cross-section data used in their calculation. The proper use of unit cell data and need for confirming the appropriate selection of input parameters through direct perturbations are described. The uses of sensitivity and uncertainty data to identify and rank potential sources of computational bias in an application system and TSUNAMI tools for assessment of system similarity using sensitivity and uncertainty criteria are demonstrated. Uses of these criteria in trending analyses to assess computational biases, bias uncertainties, and gap analyses are also described. Additionally, an application of the data adjustment tool TSURFER is provided, including identification of specific details of sources of computational bias.
Version 6 of the Standardized Computer Analyses for Licensing Evaluation (SCALE) computer software system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, released in February 2009, contains significant new capabilities and data for nuclear safety analysis and marks an important update for this software package, which is used worldwide. This paper highlights the capabilities of the SCALE system, including continuous-energy flux calculations for processing multigroup problemdependent cross sections, ENDF/B-VII continuousenergy and multigroup nuclear cross-section data,. continuous-energy Monte Carlo criticality safety calculations, Monte Carlo radiation shielding analyses with automated three-dimensional variance reduction techniques, one- and three-dimensional sensitivity and uncertainty analyses for criticality safety evaluations, two- and three-dimensional lattice physics depletion analyses, fast and accurate source terms and decay heat calculations, automated burnup credit analyses with loading curve search, and integrated three-dimensional criticality accident alarm system analyses using coupled Monte Carlo criticality and shielding calculations.
The Dual Fluid Reactor, DFR, is a novel concept of a fast heterogeneous nuclear reactor. Its key feature is the employment of two separate liquid cycles, one for fuel and one for the coolant. As opposed to other liquid-fuel concepts like the Molten-Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR), both cycles in the DFR can be separately optimized for their respective purpose, leading to advantageous consequences: A very high power density resulting in remarkable cost savings, and a highly negative temperature feedback coefficient, enabling a self-regulation without any control rods or mechanical parts in the core.
This paper presents the methodology developed for the Serpent 2 Monte Carlo code for the calculation of adjoint-weighted reactor point kinetics parameters: effective generation time and delayed neutron fractions. The calculation routines were implemented at the Politecnico di Milano, and they are based on the iterated fission probability (IFP) method. The developed methodology is mainly intended for the modeling of small research reactor cores, and the results are validated by comparison to experimental data and MCNP5 calculations in 31 critical configurations.
The advantages of using liquid sodium for a reactor coolant are ; discussed. The various practical considerations involved in designing sodiuin-; cooled reactor systems such as sodium handling, materials selection for the ; circuit, and the destructive properties of sodiuin on the circuit are discussed. ; (C.J.G.);
Information on the performance aspects of nuclear power plants is presented concerning conversion ratio, criticality, primitive economic analysis, stable breeder-converter industry, doubling time, breeder industry economic benefit, defining nuclear fuel, recommendations, and uncertainty.
Data on the electrical conductance, density, viscosity, and surface tension chloride mixtures have been systematically collected and evaluated. results are given in 124 binary mixtures over a range of compositions and temperatures. Values of the above properties for the single salts have been updated in accord with previously advanced recommendations.
The density of liquid lead was determined, by using the Archimedean principle, from its melting point to its normal boiling point. It can be expressed by the equation: D(g/cm3)=10·678 − 13·174 × 10−4(T − 600·6°) where T is in °K. The density of liquid lead is 10·678 g/cm3 at its melting point (600·6°K), and 8·803 g/cm3 at its boiling point (2024°K).