Assessment of the dry process oxide fuel in sodium-cooled fast reactors

In order to assess the feasibility of the dry reprocessed oxide fuel in a sodium-cooled fast reactor, the reactor core analysis for the equilibrium fuel cycle was performed for two selected reference cores: the Hybrid BN-600 benchmark core with a enlarged lattice pitch (Case 1) and the modified BN-600 core (Case 2). The dry reprocess technology is based on the molten-salt process, which was developed by Russian scientists for recycling oxide fuels. The core calculation was performed by the REBUS-3 code and the reactor characteristics such as the transuranic enrichment, breeding ratio, peak linear power, burnup reactivity swing, etc. were calculated for the equilibrium core under a fixed fuel management scheme. The results showed that a self-sustainable breakeven core was achieved without blanket fuels when the fuel volume fraction was - 50% and almost all the fission products were removed