Fast Nuclear Reactor Fuel Depletion Analysis Using Fourth Order Runge-Kutta Method

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Calculation of fuel depletion involved processing of nuclear data as a microscopic cross section. Macroscopic cross section calculations were performed by multiplying the microscopic cross sections by the density of the nuclide and all materials involved in the reactor itself. Diffusion equation calculations were performed in a two-dimensional cylindrical coordinate system, which involved macroscopic cross sections to obtain the distribution of neutron fluxes, neutron source densities, power densities, and k-eff. The calculation resulted in the k-eff of 1,0017918649. Thus, we concluded that the reactor was in super critical condition. Next, we used the maximum flux to be calculated in the depletion equation to get a new nuclide density for 10 years. The process of calculating depletion involved a system of twenty-eight differential equations, obtained from the nuclear transmutation chain. It took a long time and was difficult to solve analytically. In this research, the system of differential equations was numerically solved by the Fourth order Runge-Kutta Method to get the nuclide density curve with respect to time.