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Minor Actinides Incineration in a Small Molten Salt Fast Reactor

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Proceedings of The 20th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference (PBNC 2016)

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Abstract

Minor actinides (MA) accumulated in spent fuel are the primary contributors to the long-term radiological hazards of high-level nuclear waste. Due to its outstanding features such as the function of reprocessing and refueling, large negative temperature feedback coefficient and no fuel assembly fabrication, Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) is regarded as one of the candidate reactors for MA incineration. In the present work, we evaluate the MA incineration capability for a 500 MWth MSFR by considering FLiBe fuel carrier salts with different initial MA loadings. The simulated results show that the MA transmutation capability has a positive correlation to the MA loading. When MA = 18.17 mol%, the transmutation fraction during 50-year operation can achieve about 95%. The MA feeding into the fuel salt is also analyzed to obtain its influences on the MA transmutation performance. The simulated result shows that both the amount of MA transmutation and the depletion ratio of MA to heavy nuclei also have a positive correlation to the MA feeding.

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Correspondence to Jingen Chen .

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Yu, C., Zou, C., Ma, Y., Chen, J. (2017). Minor Actinides Incineration in a Small Molten Salt Fast Reactor. In: Jiang, H. (eds) Proceedings of The 20th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference. PBNC 2016. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2314-9_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2314-9_44

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2313-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2314-9

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