A low power Critical Facility at BARC, Trombay attained first criticality at 1900 hrs on Monday, 7th April, 2008. This Critical Facility is a versatile research platform designed to facilitate the study of different core lattices based on various fuel types, different moderator materials and reactivity control devices. The design provides enough flexibility to arrange the fuel in a precise geometry at the desired pitch inside the reactor core. BARC is developing a 300 MW(e) Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) which, in its equilibrium condition, will derive two-third of its energy from thorium based fuel. AHWR will serve as a technology demonstrator to facilitate development of several enabling technologies for large scale thorium utilisation in the third stage of Indian nuclear power programme. The first-of-a-kind reactor core configuration of AHWR will be progressively simulated in this Critical Facility, which is equipped with state-of-art nuclear instrumentation. Optimisation of physics design of AHWR and generation of additional nuclear data relevant to the design of thorium based advanced reactor will be the main research programme for this Critical Facility, which also offers flexibility to suit the core configuration of future Pressurised Heavy Water and Light Water Reactors. BARC is currently building a 20 MeV proton accelerator, which will be used for generating neutrons. It is contemplated to couple the Critical Facility with this external neutron source for carrying out some early studies on the reactor physics aspects of Accelerator Driven Sub-Critical reactor systems. A photograph of “REACTOR BLOCK OF CRITICAL FACILITY FOR AHWR” is attached.  |