Pwr Fuel Macroscopic Cross Section Analysis for Calculation Core Fuel Management Benchmark

Abstract

The in-core fuel management of PWR reactor is very complex because the core is loaded by several enrichments as well as the number and types of burnable poison rod (pyrex) of the fuel assemblies. Besides that, the boron content in the moderator rely on the operation condition. Therefore, the core calculation requires macroscopic neutron cross section representing each type of fuel assemblies and operating conditions. The evaluation of in-core fuel management in the PWR needs a validated code. The PWR-FUEL code has been verified on the criticality cases and showed a satisfaction results. However, the code is not yet validated with the benchmark in-core fuel management cases. This study aims to generate the macroscopic cross sections for the fuel assemblies of PWR Almaraz Unit II which used as a benchmark case for the in-core fuel management that described in the IAEA-TECDOC-815. The cross sections are generated by using the SRAC2006 core which has been used in the criticality analysis of AP1000 reactor. The calculation results showed that the cross section is accurate since the maximum difference value of kinf is 1.87%.