Skip to main content
SHARE
Publication

Impacts of Fast-Spectrum Molten Salt Reactor Characteristics on Fuel Cycle Performance

by Andrei Rykhlevskii, Andrew Worrall, Katheryn Huff
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
Proceedings of GLOBAL 2019
Publication Date
Page Numbers
514 to 521
Conference Name
Global/Top Fuel 2019
Conference Location
Seattle, Washington, United States of America
Conference Sponsor
ANS
Conference Date
-

The System Analysis and Integration Campaign nuclear fuel cycle evaluation and screening study was conducted to outline the potential benefits and challenges of nuclear fuel cycle options. The study identified continuous recycle in fast critical reactors as a common characteristic shared among some of the most promising future nuclear fuel cycles. This study was technology agnostic to focus on the underpinning physics that drives fuel cycle outcomes. This process used an analysis example to generate a physics-based understanding of the fuel cycle, and it yielded performance metrics over ranges rather than comparing absolute numbers. While no fast-spectrum molten salt reactor (MSR) has ever been built, several concepts exist using different fuels and carrier salts, many of which target high-burnup objectives, such as lightwater reactor nuclear waste consumption. Putting the resulting fuel cycle impacts of these reactor choices (e.g., fuel and neutron spectrum) into perspective is informative for our current understanding of a given fuel cycle’s performance, and it also demonstrates the applicability of MSRs to different fuel cycles. It has been established that in a fuel cycle transition, performance of a given fast-spectrum MSR depends in part on the initial fuel loading requirements and processing methods.