Shielding Design and Dose Evaluation for HTR-PM Fuel Transport Pipelines by QAD-CGA Program

The spherical fuel elements are adopted in the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor pebble-module (HTR-PM). The fuel elements will be discharged continuously from the reactor core and transported into the fuel transport pipelines during the reactor operation, leading to spatially varying dose outside the pipeline. In this case, the dose evaluation faces two major challenges, including dynamic source terms and pipelines with varying lengths and shapes. This study tries to handle these challenges for HTR-PM through comprehensive calculations using the QAD-CGA program and to design the corresponding shielding of the pipeline. During the calculation, it is assumed that a spherical fuel element stays in different positions of the pipelines in turn, and the corresponding dose contributions were calculated. By integrating the dose contributions at different positions, the dose at the points of interest can be obtained. The total dose is further determined according to the assumed fuel elements transport speed of 5 m/s and total 6000 fuel elements transportation per day. Two types of fuel transport pipelines and two source terms were considered, i.e., the spent fuel element transport pipelines with corresponding spent fuel source term and the different burn-up fuel element transport pipelines with the average burn-up fuel source term. Doses at different points of interest were calculated with no shielding scenario and with lead shielding of different thicknesses scenario. To evaluate the shielding effect, the dose limit of the orange radiation zone of HTR-PM and the radiation damage thresholds from NCRP report No.51 were both adopted. The calculated results show that, for pipelines that transport the spent fuel, a 4 cm lead shielding will be enough. And for pipelines that transport fuel elements with different burn-up, a 5 cm lead shielding will be added. The method and results can provide valuable reference for other work of HTR-PM.