Preliminary estimation of isotopic inventories of 2000 MWt ABR (revision 1).

Abstract

The isotopic inventories of a 2000 MWt Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR) core have been estimated to support the ABR accident analysis to be reported in the Appendix D of the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS). Based on the Super-PRISM design, a preliminary core design of 2000 MWt ABR was developed to achieve a one-year cycle length with 3-batch fuel management scheme. For a bounding estimation of transuranics (TRU) inventory, a low TRU conversion ratio ({approx}0.3) was targeted to increase the TRU enrichment. By changing the fuel compositions, isotopic inventories of mass and radioactivity were evaluated for four different core configurations: recycled metal fuel core, recycled oxide fuel core, startup metal fuel core, and startup oxide fuel core. For recycled cores, the TRU recovered from ABR spent fuel was used as the primary TRU feed, and the TRU recovered from 10-year cooled light water reactor spent fuel was used as the makeup TRU feed. For startup cores, weapons-grade plutonium was used as TRU feed without recycling ABR spent fuel. It was also assumed that a whole batch of discharged fuel assemblies is stored in the in-vessel storage for an entire irradiation cycle. For both metal and oxide fuel cores, the estimated TRU mass at beginning of equilibrium cycle (BOEC), including spent fuel TRU stored in the in-vessel storage, was about 8.5-8.7 MT for the recycled cores and 5.2 MT for the startup cores. Since a similar power was generated, the fission product mass are comparable for all four cores: 1.4 MT at BOEC and about 2.0 MT at end of equilibrium cycle (EOEC). Total radioactivity at BOEC is about 8.2 x 10{sup 8} curies in recycled cores and about 6.9 x 10{sup 8} curies in startup cores, and increases to about 1.1 x 10{sup 10} curies at EOEC for all four cases. Fission products are the dominant contributor (more than 80%) to the total radioactivity at EOEC for all four cases, but the fission product radioactivity decreases by 79% after one-year cooling. The heavy metal radioactivity in recycled cores is higher than that of the startup core because of the higher TRU inventory at BOEC. The leading contributors at EOEC are U-239, Np-239, Am-242 and Pu-243 at EOEC, but these short-lived nuclides decay out quickly during the refueling time. As a result, the leading contributors at BOEC are Pu-241, Cm-242, Cm-244, and Pu-238.