EVALUATION OF THE INITIAL CRITICAL CONFIGURATION OF THE HTR-10 PEBBLE-BED REACTOR

Abstract

This report describes the evaluation of data from the initial criticality measurement of the HTR-10 pebble-bed reactor at the Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology in China to determine whether the data are of sufficient quality to use as benchmarks for reactor physics computer codes intended for pebble-bed reactor analysis. The evaluation applied the INL pebble-bed reactor physics code PEBBED to perform an uncertainty analysis on the core critical height. The overall uncertainty in k-effective was slightly over 0.5%, which is considered adequate for an experimental benchmark.