A buoyantly-driven shutdown rod concept for passive reactivity control of a Fluoride salt-cooled High-temperature Reactor

This paper presents a novel buoyantly-driven shutdown rod concept for use in Fluoride salt-cooled High-temperature Reactors (FHRs). The baseline design considered here is a 900 MWth modular version of the FHR class called the Pebble Bed Advanced High-Temperature Reactor (PB-AHTR) that uses pebble fuel. Due to the high volumetric heat capacity of the primary coolant, the FHRs operate with a high power density core with a similar average coolant temperature as in modular helium reactors. The reactivity control system for the baseline PB-AHTR uses a novel buoyantly-driven shutdown rod system that can be actively or passively activated during reactor transients. In addition to a traditional active insertion mechanism, the new shutdown rod system is designed to also operate passively, fulfilling the role of a reserve shutdown system. The physical response of the shutdown rod was simulated both computationally and experimentally, using scaling arguments where applicable, with an emphasis on key phenomena identified by a preliminary Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT) study. This paper presents results from both the pre-predicted simulation and experimental validation efforts.