Regular Article

Coupling reactor design and scenario calculations: a promising method for scenario optimization

¹ CEA, DES, IRESNE, DER, SPRC, LE2C, Cadarache, 13108 Saint Paul Lez Durance, France
² CEA, DES, IRESNE, DER, SPESI, LP2E, Cadarache, 13108 Saint Paul Lez Durance, France
³ Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie (LPSC), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 53 rue des Martyrs, 38026 Grenoble, France

^* e-mail: kevin.tirel@cea.fr

Received: 14 July 2021
Received in final form: 18 February 2022
Accepted: 24 February 2022
Published online: 25 May 2022

Abstract

The link between reactor design studies and scenarios calculations is usually sequential. From a list set of objectives, a reactor design is produced and passed to the scenarist in the form of a numeric irradiation model. This approach assumes that the reactor design is fixed from the scenarist perspective. The method presented in this article proposes to use a flexible reactor model, built with artificial neural networks, that gives the possibility to the scenarist to change a reactor design directly during the scenario calculations. Doing so, the reactor design is no longer an imposed parameter but a tool to find new optimal trajectories. Moreover, this flexible model is able to exploit the historical loaded fuel compositions generated by the scenario calculations in order to monitor the reactor performances over time. In this paper, the flexible reactor model construction is detailed and the interest of such method is highlighted with an application case that consists in the transition from a PWR fleet, similar to the French one, towards a PWR − SFR fleet stabilizing plutonium inventory.