Feasibility analyses for HEU to LEU fuel conversion of the LAUE Langivin Institute (ILL) High Flux Reactor (RHF).

The High Flux Reactor (RHF) of the Laue Langevin Institute (ILL) based in Grenoble, France is a research reactor designed primarily for neutron beam experiments for fundamental science. It delivers one of the most intense neutron fluxes worldwide, with an unperturbed thermal neutron flux of 1.5 x 10{sup 15} n/cm{sup 2}/s in its reflector. The reactor has been conceived to operate at a nuclear power of 57 MW but currently operates at 52 MW. The reactor currently uses a Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) fuel. In the framework of its non-proliferation policies, the international community presently aims to minimize the amount of nuclear material available that could be used for nuclear weapons. In this geopolitical context, most worldwide research and test reactors have already started a program of conversion to the use of Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) fuel. A new type of LEU fuel based on a mixture of uranium and molybdenum (UMo) is expected to allow the conversion of compact high performance reactors like the RHF. This report presents the results of reactor design, performance and steady state safety analyses for conversion of the RHF from the use of HEU fuel to the use of UMo LEU fuel. The objectivemore » of this work was to show that is feasible, under a set of manufacturing assumptions, to design a new RHF fuel element that could safely replace the HEU element currently used. The new proposed design has been developed to maximize performance, minimize changes and preserve strong safety margins. Neutronics and thermal-hydraulics models of the RHF have been developed and qualified by benchmark against experiments and/or against other codes and models. The models developed were then used to evaluate the RHF performance if LEU UMo were to replace the current HEU fuel 'meat' without any geometric change to the fuel plates. Results of these direct replacement analyses have shown a significant degradation of the RHF performance, in terms of both neutron flux and cycle length. Consequently, ANL and ILL have collaborated to investigate alternative designs. A promising candidate design has been selected and studied, increasing the total amount of fuel without changing the external plate dimensions by relocating the burnable poison. In this way, changes required in the fuel element are reasonably small. With this new design, neutronics analyses have shown that performance could be maintained at a high level: 2 day decrease of cycle length (to 47.5 days at 58.3 MW) and 1-2% decrease of brightness in the cold and hot sources in comparison to the current typical operation. In addition, studies have shown that the thermal-hydraulic and shutdown margins for the proposed LEU design would satisfy technical specifications.« less