Assessment of Reactor Physics Characteristics of Prismatic Fuel Concepts With a Hydrogen-Based Moderator for Use in a Fluoride Salt-Cooled Small Modular Reactor
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fluoride-salt-cooled high temperature reactor (FHR) effectively combines the solid fuel and moderator design of high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) technology with the fluoride salt coolant (LiF-BeF2, FLiBe) of molten salt reactor (MSR) technology, enabling low-pressure (∼1 atm, 101.325 kPa), and high-temperature (∼700 °C) operations. The design and operational features of the FHR make it a potentially attractive option for a small modular reactor (SMR), provided that it can be modified and made physically small and operate at a low-enough power level (<350 MWth/<150 MWel). Most FHR-SMR designs use high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel in the form of tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) fuel particles, combined with the use of a graphite moderator. However, there are alternative design concepts for an FHR-SMR that may offer superior performance characteristics, while utilizing an alternative fissile fuel supply option. In this exploratory study, lattice physics calculations were performed with Serpent to evaluate an alternative FHR-SMR prismatic fuel block design concept using coated annular fuel pellets instead of TRISO-particle fuel compacts, along with the use of hydrogen-based solid moderator rods made of 7LiH. In initial studies, it was found that fuel blocks with 120 moderator rods made of 7LiH tended to have large positive temperature reactivity coefficients (TRCs), which is undesirable for safety reasons. However, reducing the number of moderator rods to 90 or 54, while increasing the number of fuel rods and coolant holes led to low or negative temperature coefficients. For a prismatic fuel block design with 54-7LiH moderator rods, the isothermal temperature coefficient of reactivity (Isothermal TRC), with simultaneous changes in the fuel (F), graphite (G), hydrogen (H), and coolant (C) temperatures, ranges between −0.159 mk/K and −0.054 mk/K, depending on the operating temperature and fuel burnup. Such alternative FHR-SMR fuels could achieve a single-batch core life of ∼10 years with low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, and ∼45 years with HALEU, in a 350-MWth reactor core.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it