CONCEPTUAL DESIGN UPDATE OF A SMALL MODULAR REACTOR CORE USING TRISO FUEL/ACTUALIZACION EN EL DISENO CONCEPTUAL DEL NUCLEO DE UN REACTOR MODULAR PEQUEÑO USANDO COMBUSTIBLE TRISO

In recent years, the design of new prototypes of small modular reactors has generated a growing interest in the international scientific community. Their applications and versatility make them an attractive option among candidates considered in generation III+ and IV. The use of TRi-structural ISOtropic fuel (TRISO) in integral pressurized water reactors (iPWR) constitutes a challenge to achieve extended fuel cycles. To obtain high proliferation resistance, extended fuel cycles for the iPWRs have been proposed. Obtaining such a large cycle length, using low fuel enrichment, without shuffle, and with a relatively small core size, is a challenge for the neutronic design of the reactor core. Previous works have analyzed the characteristics of an iPWR using TRISO fuel with a power of 25 MWt. In this work, a full-core neutronic computational model based in SERPENT code was developed, allowing to describe the performance of the proposed reactor core configurations. The core neutronic update is made with the aim of increasing the thermal power. The radial power distributions, fuel cycle length and other parameters for the different variants are analyzed and compared.