Exploring new coolants for nuclear breeder reactors

Breeder reactors are considered a unique tool for fully exploiting natural nuclear resources. In current Light Water Reactors (LWR), only 0.5% of the primary energy contained in the nuclei removed from a mine is converted into useful heat. The rest remains in the depleted uranium or spent fuel. The need to improve resource-efficiency has stimulated interest in Fast-Reactor-based fuel cycles, which can exploit a much higher fraction of the energy content of mined uranium by burning U-238, mainly after conversion into Pu-239. Thorium fuel cycles also offer several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle. The coolant initially selected for most of the FBR programs launched in the 1960s was sodium, which is still considered the best candidate for these reactors. However, Na-cooled FBRs have a positive void reactivity coefficient. Among other factors, this fundamental drawback has resulted in the canceled deployment of these reactors. Therefore, it seems reasonable to explore new options for breeder coolants. In this paper, a proposal is presented for a new molten salt (F2Be) coolant that could overcome the safety issues related to the positive void reactivity coefficient of molten metal coolants. Although it is a very innovative proposal that would require an extensive R and D program, this paper presents the very appealing properties of this salt when using a specific type of fuel that is similar to that of pebble bed reactors. The F2Be concept was studied over a typical MOX composition and extended to a thorium-based cycle. The general analysis took into account the requirements for criticality (opening the option of hybrid subcritical systems); the requirements for breeding; and the safety requirement of having a negative coolant void reactivity coefficient. A design window was found in the definition of a F2Be cooled reactor where the safety requirement was met, unlike for molten metal-cooled reactors, which always have positive void reactivity coefficients, in the case of both critical and subcritical reactors.