background: decrease of economically accessible uranium resources motivates consideration of breeding of fertile elements such as thorium. material and method: thorium oxide fuel burn up calculation of a simulated research reactor cooled heavy water has been proposed in the present work using mcnpx 2.6 code. two 233u and 235u isotopes have been used as fissile element of thorium oxide fuel. 135...

Background: Decrease of economically accessible uranium resources motivates consideration of breeding of fertile elements such as thorium. Material and Method: Thorium oxide fuel burn up calculation of a simulated research reactor cooled heavy water has been proposed in the present work using MCNPX 2.6 code. Two 233U and 235U isotopes have been used as fissile element of thorium oxide fuel. 135...

Thorium is an element for possible use as nuclear fuel, because of the fertile property of Th-232, which could convert into U-233 after neutron capture and beta decays. However, thorium based fuels have not been successfully implemented, because of the high cost and the higher complexity compared with once-through uranium fuel. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is on thorium for use in tradit...

Our previous studies on water cooled thorium breeder reactor based on matured pressurized water reactor (PWR) plant technology concluded that reduced moderated core by arranging fuel pins in a triangular tight lattice array and using heavy water as coolant is appropriate for achieving better breeding performance and higher burn-up simultaneously [1–6]. One optimum core that produces 3.5 GW ther...

The FACET group at CIEMAT is studying the properties and potentialities of several lead-cooled ADS designs for actinide and fission product transmutation. The main characteristics of these systems are the use of lead as primary coolant and moderator and fuels made by transuranics inside a thorium oxide matrix. The aim of the study is to analyse the effect of some operation parameters (fuel tran...

Recently, interest in thorium’s potential use in a nuclear fuel cycle has been renewed. Thorium is more abundant, at least on average, than uranium in the earth’s crust and, therefore, could theoretically extend the use of nuclear energy technology beyond the economic limits of uranium resources. This paper provides an economic assessment of thorium availability by creating cumulative-availabil...

The reaction of phosgene with thorium oxide has been shown to be a good method for preparing thorium tetrachloride. The equilibria of the reaction showed that nearly complete utilization of phosgene could be attained in a properly designed reactor. The kinetics of the reaction could not be represented by a simple rate law but the effects of bed depth, particle size, mode of oxide preparation an...

The first step in investigation of thorium fuel is evaluation of the results obtained from the spectral code for this type of fuel. The benchmark summarized by IAEA in 2003 was used for partial validation of the code HELIOS 1.9. The benchmark was focused on a comparison of the methods and basic nuclear data. Acceptable results of benchmark comparison allowed examining and comparing different ad...