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Design Study of Gas Cooled Fast Reactor with Helium as Coolant and Natural Uranium as Fuel Cycle

¹Meri Yanti and ²Zaki Su’ud

^1,2KK Nuclear and Biophysics, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia

Email: meri_yanti@students.itb.ac.id

Abstract

Gas Cooled Fast Reactor (GFR) is one of six selected of IV generation reactor. GFR has Brayton fuel cycle, uses fast neutron and operates in the high temperature (850˚C).This condition has benefit to produce hydrogen. As we know that hydrogen is the one of promising energy because it cannot produces CO₂, CO, SO₂ and global warming. GFR has high safety, proliferation resistant and economical. In this case, we will burn natural uranium (U-238) for 60 years and put them in 6 regions which have same volume. Hence, in the next 10 year, GFR produce plutonium and this plutonium will be moved from first region to the second region, the fuel from second region is moved to the third region etc. In this experiment, we use GFR with 2400 MWth, Helium as coolant and Stainless Steel 316 (SS316) as cladding. In this research, we did simulation with SRAC, a code developed by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), to know about neutron design, thermal hydraulic of GFR. The thermal hydraulics is able to calculate in-core temperature distribution, coolant density profile, coolant mass flow and flow rate, and also coolant pressure drop after passing through the core.

Keywords: GFR, helium, pin

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