Depletion of Gadolinium burnable poison in a PWR assembly with high burnup fuel

Abstract

Abstract A tendency to increase the discharge burnup of nuclear fuel for Advanced Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) has been a characteristic of its operation for many years. It will be able to burn at very high burnup of about 70 GWd/t with UO2 fuels. The U-235 enrichment must be higher than 5 %, which leads to the necessity of using an extremely efficient burnable poison like Gadolinium oxide. Using gadolinium isotope is significant due to its particular depletion behavior (“Onion-Skin” effect). In this paper, the MCNPX2.7 code is used to calculate the important neutronic parameters of the next generation fuels of PWR. K-infinity, local peaking factor and fission rate distributions are calculated for a PWR assembly which burn at very high burnup reaching 70 GWd/t. The calculations are performed using the recently released evaluated Gadolinium cross section data. The results obtained are close to those of a LWR next generation fuel benchmark problem. This demonstrates that the calculation scheme used is able to accurately model a PWR assembly that operates at high burnup values.