Burnup importance function and its application to OECD/NEA/BUC phase II-A and II-C models

Okuno, Hiroshi; Tonoike, Kotaro; Sakai, Tomohiro*

Proceedings of International Conference on the New Frontiers of Nuclear Technology; Reactor Physics, Safety and High-Performance Computing (PHYSOR 2002) (CD-ROM), 8 Pages, 2002/10

As the burnup proceeds, reactivity of fuel assemblies for light water reactors decreases by depletion of fissile nuclides, especially in the axially central region. In order to describe the importance of the end regions to the reactivity change, a burnup importance function was introduced as a weighting function to a local burnup variation contributed to a reactivity decrease. The function was applied to the OECD/NEA/BUC Phase II-A model and a simplified Phase II-C model. The application to Phase II-A model clearly showed that burnup importance of the end regions increases as burnup and/or cooling time increases. Comparison of the burnup importance function for different initial enrichments was examined. The application result to the simplified Phase II-C model showed that the burnup importance function was helpful to find the most reactive fuel burnup distribution under the conditions that the average fuel burnup was kept constant and the variations in the fuel burnup were within the maximum and minimum measured values.