Burn-up dependency of control rod position at zero-power criticality in the high-temperature engineering test reactor

The high-temperature engineering test reactor (HTTR) is a block-type high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), which was constructed in Japan. The operating data of HTTR with burn-up to about 370 EFPD (effective full-power days), which are very important for the development of HTGRs, have been collected in both zero-power and powered operations. In the aspects of code validation, the detailed prediction of temperature distribution in the core makes it difficult to validate the calculation code because of difficulty in measuring the core temperature directly in powered operation of the HTTR. In this study, the measured data of the control rod position, while keeping the temperature distribution in the core uniform at criticality in zero-power operation at the beginning of each operation cycle were compared with the calculated results by core physics design code of the HTTR. The measured data of the control rod position were modified based on the core temperature correlation. At the beginning of burn-up, the trends of burn-up characteristics are slightly different between experimental and calculation data. However, the calculated result shows less than 50 mm of small difference (total length of control rod is 4060 mm) to the measured one, which indicates that the calculated results appropriately reproduced burn-up characteristics, such as a decrease in uranium-235, accumulation in plutonium, and decrease in burnable absorber.