Abstract
Due to the challenges of spent fuel accumulation, the nuclear industry is exploring more cost-effective solutions for spent fuel management. The burnup-credit method, in application for storage and transport of the spent fuel, gained traction over recent decades since it can remove the over-conservatism of the “fresh-fuel” approach. The presented research is focused on creating an innovative, best estimate approach of the burnup-credit method for boiling water reactor (BWR) spent fuel based on the results of neutronic/thermal-hydraulic coupled full core simulations. The analysis is performed using a Polaris/DYN3D sequence. Four different shuffling procedures were used to estimate the possible range of the BWR fuel discharged burnup variation. The results showed a strong influence of the shuffling procedure on the final burnup distribution. Moreover, a comparison of the 2D lattice and 3D coupled nodal approaches was conducted for the criticality estimation of single fuel assemblies. The analysis revealed substantial improvement in criticality curves obtained with the full-core model. Finally, it was shown that the benefit from the burnup-credit method is larger in the case of more optimal fuel utilisation-based shuffling procedures. The new approach developed here delivers a promising basis for future industrial optimisation procedures and thus cost optimisation.
Highlights
The amount of discharged spent nuclear fuel (SF) has been steadily growing over recent decades [1].In 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated that around 10,000 MtHM/year of spent fuel (SF) is being discharged from nuclear power plants (NPPs), from which approximately4000 MtHM/year goes to reprocessing and the rest remains in the storage facilities [2]
The current study aimed to create the best estimate for burnup credit (BUC) in application to boiling water reactor (BWR) spent fuel discharged at realistic final burnups
The study aims to answer the following two research questions: “How strong is the influence of different core loading strategies on the discharge burnup distribution?” and “How much credit can we gain for the best estimate analysis of the BWR spent fuel at the discharged burnups in comparison to the fresh fuel standard and the peak reactivity approach?”
Summary
The amount of discharged spent nuclear fuel (SF) has been steadily growing over recent decades [1]. The current study aimed to create the best estimate for BUC in application to BWR spent fuel discharged at realistic final burnups. For this purpose, the FA behaviour in the reactor core was evaluated by performing full core nodal simulations with different fuel reloading patterns, which provided the comprehensive data for each assembly in the core. The study aims to answer the following two research questions: “How strong is the influence of different core loading strategies on the discharge burnup distribution?” and “How much credit can we gain for the best estimate analysis of the BWR spent fuel at the discharged burnups in comparison to the fresh fuel standard and the peak reactivity approach?”.
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