Title: Nuclear Material Control & Accounting for Pebble Bed Reactors
Authors: Donald Kovacic, Philip Gibbs, Jianwei Hu, Donny Hartanto, Cory Ball, Robert McElroy Jr., Nicholas Luciano, Rachel Hunneke, and Tom Pham – Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Abstract: This presentation will discuss the work done under the US Department of Energy NE-5 Advanced Reactor Safeguards and Security Program during FY 2023. It provides a summary of material control and accounting (MC&A) for pebble bed reactors (PBRs) and addresses some of the main challenges with current PBR MC&A approaches that will inform safeguards and security by design efforts. The efforts to date have focused on tristructural isotropic (TRISO) pebble fuel material accounting and control including working with partners in industry, loss and production of nuclear material as part of reactor operations, burnup modeling and measurements, uncertainty quantifications for such modeling and measurements, statistical approaches needed, and measurement methods. The unique fuel management and utilization in a PBR, where the fuel in spherical form is introduced and circulates through the reactor, poses special challenges for MC&A. This contrasts with traditional water-cooled reactors in which the fuel is contained in large assemblies and can be easily identified and counted. Even online fueled reactors, such as the CANDU reactors (none of which operate in the United States), are significantly different because the fuel is still contained in relatively large assemblies, is uniquely identified, and the number of assemblies that pass through the core on an annual basis is much fewer than the hundreds of thousands that circulate in a PBR, none of which are uniquely identified. Additionally, the nature of the TRISO fuel results in very low heavy metal loading with each pebble containing less than 10 g of uranium and on the order of less than 1 g of fissile material. This low fuel density and the robustness of the TRISO particles are major features of the TRISO fuel from a safety basis as each TRISO particle and pebble acts as a containment for the nuclear material and fission products during normal and accident conditions. This also results in very low plutonium loading per pebble during normal operations, which is on the order of 0.1 g at full burnup. A major feature of PBRs is that they will allow for significantly higher burnup, on the order of 160 GWd/THM compared to the burnup of traditional LWRs, which is on the order of 45 GWd/THM. This is achieved by monitoring the pebbles as they circulate through the reactor and allowing them to be reintroduced into the core until the desired burnup is achieved and they are removed from the reactor and enter the spent fuel storage areas.
These features and aspects of PBRs require unique approaches to material accounting and control that
provides assurance that the material is accounted for at all stages of operation and controlled to prevent the theft or diversion by internal or external adversaries. Modeling approaches for PBRs provide a detailed understanding of the isotopic content of the fuel as it circulates through the reactor, but this should be validated by actual measurements of used TRISO fuel. Although used fuel is difficult to accurately measure due to the presence of fission products and the high radiation environment and other physical and operational constraints, the ability to model and measure each pebble allows for much greater accuracy than in traditional water-cooled reactors and the low heavy metal loading means that accumulating large amounts of nuclear material is very difficult for an adversary to achieve. The theft of individual pebbles is of course still a concern from a security perspective, and the MC&A must address this as part of US domestic licensing under the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The MC&A of nuclear material for PBRs will differ from that used in the current fleet of light water reactors in the United States. In some ways, there are parallels to how bulk nuclear material is accounted for in fuel cycle facilities. However, the fuel pebbles are discrete objects that are easily detected, can be visually observed, and can be mechanically counted and controlled. The mass of the containers and the fuel pebbles they contain fits within the batch and piece part accounting structure commonly used. The ability to measure the burnup of individual pebbles provides a powerful tool that is not used in current LWRs. This provides validation of reactor models and thus the loss and production of nuclear material is theoretically more accurate than is possible in an LWR.