A Neutronic Feasibility Study of SMART Core Design Fully Loaded with FCM Fuel

Since the fissile volume is small in a FCM fuel pellet, high uranium density material, uranium nitride (UN), is encapsulated in a large diameter fuel kernel of 800. Zirconium (Zr) alloy is used for the cladding material with the thin SiC coating to suppress the metal water reaction. The safety of the small nuclear power plants is more emphasized because of possibly small proposed exclusion area boundaries and of distance to the populated area. In this paper, the applicability of FCM fuel to SMART core is studied. The core of SMART consists of 57 17Χ17 fuel assemblies with active height of 2m. The fission power is 330 MWth and the cycle length is 3 years with the capacity factor of 0.9. Feasibility study to utilize fully ceramic microencapsulated fuel in small LWR such as SMART has been performed. The result shows that accident resistant FCM fuel can be utilized in neutronic design point of view with fat pellet dimension and well-chosen erbia BISO contents to give appropriate cycle length and basic neutronic characteristics. Therefore FCM fuel is worth further study for the small integral reactor such as SMART