Abstract: Traveling wave reactor (TWR) is an innovative conceptual fast reactor, which takes with once through breeding-burning mode and includes ignition and propagation regions. TWR’s operation comprises stages of ignition start-up, wave forming, stable propagation of wave and lifetime extinguishing etc. TWR response to perturbation of reactor fuel component change in ignition and propagation stages was investigated in the paper. The results indicate that TWR has a good self-stabilizing performance under small perturbation.