https://doi.org/10.1051/epjn/2019026
Regular Article
Breed-and-burn fuel cycle in molten salt reactors
1
Paul Scherrer Institut, Nuclear Energy and Safety Division, Laboratory for Scientific Computing and Modelling,
5232
Villigen PSI,
Switzerland
2
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behavior,
1015
Lausanne,
Switzerland
* e-mail: boris.hombourger@protonmail.com
Received:
1
April
2019
Received in final form:
1
July
2019
Accepted:
12
August
2019
Published online: 15 November 2019
The operation of a reactor on an open but self-sustainable cycle without actinide separation is known as breed-and-burn. It has mostly been envisioned for use in solid-fueled fast-spectrum reactors such as sodium-cooled fast reactors. In this paper the applicability of breed-and-burn to molten salt reactors is investigated first on a cell level using a modified neutron excess method. Several candidate fuel salts are selected and their performance in a conceptual three-dimensional reactor is investigated. Chloride-fueled single-fluid breed-and-burn molten salt reactors using enriched chlorine are shown to be feasible from a neutronics and fuel cycle point of view at the cost of large fuel inventories.
© B. Hombourger et al. published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
