The Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) can meet the demand of transmutation and breeding. In this study, theoretical calculation of steady thermal hydraulic characteristics of a graphite-moderated channel type MSR is conducted. The DRAGON code is adopted to calculate the axial and radial power factor firstly. The flow and heat transfer model in the fuel salt and graphite are developed on basis of the fundamental mass, momentum and energy equations. The results show the detailed flow distribution in the core, and the temperature profiles of the fuel salt, inner and outer wall in the nine typical elements along the axial flow direction are also obtained.
The Molten Salt Reactor （MSR）, one of the ‘Generation Ⅳ＇ concepts, is a liquid-fuel reactor, which is different from the conventional reactors using solid fissile materials due to the flow effect of fuel salt. The study on its neutronics considering the fuel salt flow, which is the base of the thermal-hydraulic calculation and safety analysis, must be done. In this paper, the theoretical model on neutronics under steady condition for a single-liquid-fueled MSR is conducted and calculated by numerical method. The neutronics model consists of two group neutron diffusion equations for fast and thermal neutron fluxes, and balance equations for six-group delayed neutron precursors considering the flow effect of fuel salt. The spatial discretization of the above models is based on the finite volume method, and the discretization equations are computed by the source iteration method. The distributions of neutron fluxes and the distributions of the delayed neutron precursors in the core are obtained. The numerical calculated results show that, the fuel salt flow has little effect on the distribution of fast and thermal neutron fluxes and the effective multiplication factor; however, it affects the distribution of the delayed neutron precursors significantly, especially the long-lived one. In addition, it could be found that the delayed neutron precursors influence the neutronics slightly under the steady condition.
