Preliminary Study on Influencing Factors of Fuel Economy for Heat Pipe Reactor

The heat pipe reactor directly extracts heat from the core through the high temperature heat pipe, the system design itself is extremely simplified, and it is more suitable as a technical selection of a small nuclear power source. Fuel economy is an important basis for the selection of reactor technology routes. In order to study the impact of heat pipe reactor design on its fuel cycle economy in detail, a preliminary analysis model of the fuel economy influencing factors of the heat pipe reactor is established in this paper. The eVinci reactor is taken as an example to develop the fuel cycle economy. Exploring and researching on the influencing factors of fuel economy, we obtained the influence trend of the fuel economy such as the overall scheme power scale and core operating temperature. The results show that due to the comprehensive impact of fuel prices, uranium loading, and enrichment, the preferred power scale range for relatively good fuel economy of heat pipe reactors is between about 1MWt and 5MWt. Increasing the core operating temperature can greatly improve fuel economy, and economic best power range is extended to high power scale.