Presentazioni e Articoli Tecnici

The Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), proposed along with other five innovative concepts of fission nuclear reactor by the Generation IV International Forum (GIF-IV), represents a challenging task from the modeling perspective because of the strong coupling between neutronics and thermo-hydrodynamics due to liquid fuel circulation in the primary loop. In this paper COMSOL Multiphysics^® is adopted to investigate the MSR neutronics, focusing on the steady-state core average conditions of the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The results achieved by COMSOL, adopting a two energy group diffusion model and using group constants calculated by means of the deterministic code SCALE5.1, are compared with those achieved by the stochastic code MCNP for validation purpose.