2. Reactor

2.1 Mechanical design

The main components of the AGR reactor system are the core, heat exchangers and blowers, which are housed in a pre-stressed concrete casing with an internal stainless steel liner that also acts as a deflector to optimize cooling of the casing's internal structures. The graphite moderator consists of columns of stacked graphite bricks held together by a system of wedges. These bricks are designed to slow neutrons, form cooling channels and house fuel elements and instrumentation (figure 3 ). Figure 4 shows the lattice pattern: fuel element location,...