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Abstract
Jerome Jonnet, Jan Leen Kloosterman, and Brian Boer,
Development of a stress analysis code for TRISO particles in HTRs,
International Conference on the Physics of Reactors, "Nuclear Power: a Sustainable Resource" (PHYSOR-2008), Interlaken, Switzerland (2008).
The PUMA project is a Specific Targeted Research Project of the European Union EURATOM 6-th Framework Program.
Complementary with other initiatives, the PUMA project is mainly aimed at providing additional key elements for
the utilisation and transmutation of plutonium and minor actinides in high temperature gas-cooled reactor designs.
Within PUMA, new coated particle designs for Pu/Ma incineration will be explored. For this purpose, Delft University
of Technology (TU-Delft) participates in the optimisation of the fuel design of HTRs fuelled with plutonium and/or
minor actinides by calculating the failure fraction of TRISO particles during irradiation in a given reactor core design.
This is achieved by coupling a neutronics, thermal-hydraulics and fuel depletion code system, which delivers the fuel
temperature, fast neutron flux and power density profiles, to an in-house developed stress analysis code. The latter
is being further developed to provide a reliable and realistic failure fraction. Application to a PBMR-400 design
fuelled with 1-st generation Plutonium and with a target burn-up of 700 MWd/kgHM shows promising results in terms
of Pu-burning capabilities. The TRISO particle failure fraction is also calculated and compared to U-based fuel
particles. It is shown that the Pu-based fuel particles need a better design and this can be achieved by use of
the present stress analysis code.
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