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Population growth, industrial development as well as limited fossil fuel resources have motivated the study of other energies, especially nuclear energy. Small modular reactors have been introduced as an efficient energy source due to their greater safety, easy transport, electricity generation and water desalination, even in remote areas. Optimization in the nuclear fuel management to improve performance and save energy leads to cost-effective design with higher efficiency and better safety. In this research, core loading pattern optimization of system-integrated modular advanced reactor (SMART) has been considered using the new dragonfly algorithm. In addition to the selected algorithm, the efficiency of optimizing loading pattern also depends on the definition of the objective function. Two-objective functions including flattening the power distribution and maximizing the effective multiplication factor are considered. Simulations of the reactor fuel assemblies and reactor core were performed by DRAGON lattice calculation and PARCS core calculation codes, respectively. According to the final results, the cycle length and effective multiplication factor are increased for 185 days and 582 pcm, respectively. Also the fitness function is decreased from 0.905931 to 0.194527.

Because of many special benefits of the Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and the Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactors (ADSRs), they are subject of a large number of studies all over the world. In the present work, the ADS photoneutron target for Holos reactor was designed and optimized by using MCNPX2.6 code. The Continuous Slowing Down Approximation (CSDA) ranges of passing electrons through tantalum, tungsten, mercury, lead and lead-bismuth were investigated. The production and leakage rates for neutrons and photons, and therefore, the deposited heat from neutrons and photons were calculated considering the electron beam bombardment of tantalum, tungsten, mercury, lead and lead-bismuth targets at beam energies of 100–1000 MeV. Other factors such as the optimization of photoneutron target dimensions for 20 and 200 MeV electron beams, and choosing of the optimal energy of incident electrons for the optimized photoneutron target were examined.