https://doi.org/10.1051/epjn/2017001
Regular Article
Neutronics characterization of an erbia fully poisoned PWR assembly by means of the APOLLO2 code
ENEA,
Via Martiri di Monte Sole 4,
40129
Bologna, Italy
⁎ e-mail: roberto.pergreffi@enea.it
Received:
19
October
2016
Received in final form:
19
December
2016
Accepted:
24
January
2017
Published online: 21 March 2017
Recently, increasing demands on the reduction of fuel cycle costs have led to higher burnup fuel designs. According to the erbia-credit super high burnup fuel concept, developed by mixing low content of erbia to UO2 powder directly after reconversion process so that all fuel pins in a given fuel assembly are homogeneously doped, the present study aims to characterize, from a neutronic point of view, a 17 × 17 pressurized water reactor assembly enriched to 10.27 wt.% in 235U with an erbia content of 1 at.% (i.e. 0.7 wt.%) by means of the deterministic neutronic code APOLLO2. For this purpose, a simplified thermal-hydraulic analysis was performed in order to evaluate the effects on fuel thermal conductivity of adding erbia to uranium oxide. The results obtained allow to conclude that an Er-doped assembly enriched to >5 wt.% in 235U represents an advantageous solution for very long fuel cycles, and it is so suited for very high burnups.
© R. Pergreffi et al., published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
