Abstract

The boron-free fuel storage pool of the ship-based SMR is part of the ship’s fuel operation and storage system. The spent fuel storage rack in the fuel temporary pool is used to store spent fuel assemblies unloaded from the core after the ship’s reactor is shut down. Compared with onshore reactors, ship-based reactors face more complex marine conditions and accident conditions during the operation on the sea, such as tilting, swaying, and collision, etc. As a consequence, the fuel storage rack of the ship will be deformed and there is a risk of supercritical accident. In this work, the criticality study of spent fuel storage rack of a ship-based reactor was performed. First, the deformation of storage rack under marine conditions and accident conditions were obtained by mechanical analysis. Then, various criticality analysis models were established and the critical calculation was carried out by the JMCT Monte Carlo code, accounting for the deformation of such conditions of the spent fuel storage rack. The effects of different marine conditions and accident conditions on the effective multiplication factor of the ship-based storage rack were investigated. The results show that the studied ship-based boron-free storage rack is in a subcritical state under the conditions considered above.

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