BURNUP CALCULATIONS OF THE JSI TRIGA REACTOR FUEL AND COMPARISON WITH MEASUREMENTS

Abstract

Fuel burnup of the JSI TRIGA was calculated by simulating complete operational history consisting of 240 different core configurations from 1966 to 2020. At the moment we are unable to perform burnup measurements, e.g. gamma spectroscopy on burned fuel elements, hence we used weekly measured excess reactivity as a reference point of different core configurations to verify the calculated core reactivity. Changes in reactivity due to burnup were assumed to be linear and this assumption was verified for burnup intervals smaller than 3 MWd/kg(HM). The comparison was performed on 46 different core configurations with different type of fuel elements. The Serpent-2 calculations decently predict the rate of reactivity change on different cases, as 52 % of calculations are withing 1σ and 86.9 % within 2σ of the measurements for total number of 46 cases. Additional analysis was performed by comparing unit cell calculations of different fuel types. Four different types of TRIGA fuel were used to analyse burnup changes in LEU and HEU fuel, where positive reactivity feedback on burnup was observed for HEU fuel due to burnable absorbers. Serpent-2 and WIMSD-5B were compared on unit-cell basis where good agreement within 200 pcm of reactivity change for large burnup was observed. In addition neutron spectrum changes due to burnup were investigated using unit-cell calculations where 4 % increase of the thermal peak and 1 % decrease of fast peak of the spectrum was observed for typical fuel burnups of 20 MWd/kg(HM), which approximately represents JSI TRIGA burnup at this moment.