Abstract
The modeling of depletion induced intranodal effects on important neutron physical parameters in nodal diffusion theory is addressed. Consideration is given to two situations where these aspects are of particular interest, namely, in mixed oxide cores where strong interaction between uranium and plutonium mixed oxide assemblies occur, and in boiling water reactor cores where significant control rod history effects are encountered. A model based on a low order polynomial representation of intranodal cross-section spatial behaviour is considered. Two approaches for determining the constraints for the polynomial fitting procedure are applied. The first one is a conventional method employing intranodal exposure values, whereas the second model combines intranodal exposure and isotopic inventory information. Numerical studies are performed in order to evaluate the relative merits of the different models. It is demonstrated that pin power predictions are significantly influenced by intranodal effects. It is also found that the combined use of intranodal isotopic inventory and exposure distributions for estimating intranodal cross-section behaviour significantly improves the accuracy in pin powers over the more traditional approach of utilizing exposure distributions only.
Published Version
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