An Investigation of fuel and fission product behavior in rise-to-power test of HTTR, 2; Results up to 30 MW operation

Ueta, Shohei   ; Emori, Koichi; Tobita, Tsutomu*; Takahashi, Masashi*; Kuroha, Misao; Ishii, Taro*; Sawa, Kazuhiro

In the safety design requirements for the High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) fuel, it is determined that "the as-fabricated failure fraction shall be less than 0.2%" and "the additional failure fraction shall be small through the full service period". Therefore the failure fraction should be quantitatively evaluated during the HTTR operation. In order to measure the primary coolant activity, primary coolant radioactivity signals the in safety protection system, the fuel failure detection (FFD) system and the primary coolant sampling system are provided in the HTTR. The fuel and fission product behavior was evaluated based on measured data in the rise-to-power tests (1) to (4). The measured fractional releases are constant at 210 up to 60% of the reactor power, and then increase to 710 at full power operation. The prediction shows good agreement with the measured value. These results showed that the release mechanism varied from recoil to diffusion of the generated fission gas from the contaminated uranium in the fuel compact matrix.