Evaluation of the canister spacing and criticality safety of spent plutonium-thorium nuclear fuel

The Canadian conceptual design of the Super-Critical-Water Reactor (SCWR), known as Pressure-Tube –SCWR (PT-SCWR) is a GEN-IV design that employs the Pu/Th direct fuel cycle. The spent Pu/Th fuel is expected to be stored into Deep Geological Repository (DGR). In this study, a thermal analysis for a repository with Pu/Th spent fuel was performed using the computer code CODE_BRIGHT. The maximum temperature of the bentonite was obtained, and the …