Analysis of U₉Mo-Al 3.55 gU/cc core power peaking factor

At present, U₃S_i2-Al dispersion fuels to uranium density of 2.96 g U/cc are used for the RSG-GAS research reactor. The usage of silicide uranium fuels were chosen because they could be fabricated up to density of 5.2 gU/cc. To anticipate the usage of other fuels in the RSG-GAS core, UMo-AI fuels were chosen. There are high uranium densities in UMo-AI dispersion fuels up to 10 gU/cc with numerous contents of Mo. In this study, the UMo fuel with density of 3.55 gU/cc and contents of Mo 9 wt% (U₉Mo) were chosen. The power peaking factor of U₉Mo 3.55 gU/cc for the existing typical working core calculation has been carried out. The UMo 3.55 gU/cc core criticality data achieved by calculation using 2 dimension diffusion code Batan-EQUIL. The U₉Mo fuel macroscopic cross section data as the output of cell calculation WIMS-B5 were used for the calculation. The core calculations were performed using 2 and 3 dimension diffusion code. The calculation results showed that the maximum radial and axial power peaking factor of U₉Mo 3.55 gU/cc at 30 cm control rod depth is 1.29 and 1.73 respectively and met the safety criteria. Hence U₉Mo with 3.55 gU/cc could be applied for RSG-GAS core and operated for 900 MWD cycle length without any configuration changes. (author)