SCoRe — Concepts of Liquid Metal Cooled Space Reactors for Avoidance of Single‐Point Failure

Space nuclear Reactor Power Systems (SRPSs) are being developed to meet electrical power requirements for NASA’s planetary exploration missions early next decade. In addition to enjoying some degree of autonomy, these systems need to operate reliably through the end of the mission, which could not be realized solely through a redundancy in the reactor’s coolant loop. Besides increasing the total system mass, such hardware redundancy does not eliminate a single‐point failure in the reactor and subsequent loss of coolant. This paper presents three concepts of the liquid metal cooled. Sectored, Compact Reactor (SCoRe) for the avoidance of single‐point failure. The SCoRe‐S, ScoRe‐M, and SCoRe‐L concepts are for small, medium, and large reactor cores, covering a wide range of electrical power requirements, from 10’s of kWe to a few MWe. As a common feature in all SCoRe concepts, the reactor core is divided into six sectors that are neutronically coupled but thermal‐hydraulically decoupled. The dividers of the ...