PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS ON UTILIZATION OF THORIUM AND U-ZrH1.6 IN PUSPATI TRIGA REACTOR CORE

Abstract

Thorium is one of the potential elements for becoming a nuclear fuel for various types of nuclear power plants such as Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), High-temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTR) and Fast Neutron Reactor (FNR). This paper proposes to use thorium and uranium zirconium hydride (U-ZrH_1.6) as fuels for the PUSPATI TRIGA Reactor (RTP), which is currently operated by the Malaysian Nuclear Agency (MNA). The work was carried out using the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) Transport code. In the simulation, thorium fuel rods were placed together with U-ZrH_1.6 fuel rods in 11 different variations, which have a different thorium mass. Results, such as, effective criticality k_eff, neutron flux, and cycle length were estimated and compared to those of the experimental and simulation of the original core RTP. The neutron flux of each core with thorium displays hardly any differences when thorium is added. Similarly, from the criticality and burnup calculations, these cores show minimal increase in criticality and cycle length.