Thermalhydraulic design and cooling system optimization of the high power innovative research reactor

Reactor innovation has been implemented in a variety of new research reactors that currently are being built. At this time BATAN is designing a conceptual design of the high power research reactor which has entered the stage of design optimization. The conceptual design specifications of the innovative research reactor is a pool type reactor, water-cooled and reflected by D₂O. The reactor core has a 5 x 5 grid with 16 fuels and 4 control rods, which is inserted into a tube containing D₂O as an irradiation position. Reactor power of 50 MW is designed to generate thermal neutron flux of 5 x 1014 n/cm²s. The compact core reactor is using U₉Mo-Al fuel with uranium loading of 7 - 9 gU/cm³. Thermal hydraulic design includes modeling, calculation and analysis of the adequacy of coolant created synergy with the physical design of reactor safety. This paper aims to deliver the results of thermal hydraulic calculation and system design analysis at steady state condition. The analysis was done using various calculation programs that have been validated, i.e. Caudvap, PARET-ANL, Fluent and ChemCad 6.4.1. The calculation results show that the heat generation can be transferred without causing a two phase flow boiling by applying pressurized reactor core design, while the main components of initial design system with an integrated heat dissipation has been done, to complete the conceptual design of the RRI-50 thermal hydraulics. (author)