SCoRe — Concepts of Liquid Metal Cooled Space Reactors for Avoidance of Single‐Point Failure Available to Purchase

Space nuclear Reactor Power Systems (SRPSs) are being developed to meet electrical power requirements for NASA’s planetary exploration missions early next decade. In addition to enjoying some degree of autonomy, these systems need to operate reliably through the end of the mission, which could not be realized solely through a redundancy in the reactor’s coolant loop. Besides increasing the total system mass, such hardware redundancy does not eliminate a single‐point failure in the reactor and subsequent loss of coolant. This paper presents three concepts of the liquid metal cooled. Sectored, Compact Reactor (SCoRe) for the avoidance of single‐point failure. The SCoRe‐S, ScoRe‐M, and SCoRe‐L concepts are for small, medium, and large reactor cores, covering a wide range of electrical power requirements, from 10’s of kW_e to a few MW_e. As a common feature in all SCoRe concepts, the reactor core is divided into six sectors that are neutronically coupled but thermal‐hydraulically decoupled. The dividers of the sectors are liquid metal heat pipes, which facilitate cooling a sector experiencing a Loss of Coolant (LOC) by passively transporting the fission power generated in it to the two adjacent sectors without losing the mission. At the same time, the fission power of the reactor is reduced to avoid overheating the fuel in the sector experiencing a LOC. The SCoRe concepts have compact, hexagonal cores surrounded by a relatively thick (10 cm minimum) BeO reflector and axial BeO reflector that is 4 cm thick. The SCoRe is placed directly in front of the radiation shield, thus reducing the shield mass and that of the power system. In SCoRe‐S cores, the UN fuel pins are arranged in a triangular lattice while in the SCoRe‐M and SCoRe‐L cores, the UN fuel pins arranged in a triangular lattice are assembled in 19‐pin and 37‐pin shrouded bundles, respectively.