Regular Article

A new tool for the simulation of different nuclear fleets at equilibrium

DES/IRESNE/DER/SPRC/LE2C, CEA Cadarache, 13115 Saint Paul-lez-Durance, France

^* e-mail: heddy.barale@cea.fr

Received: 16 July 2021
Received in final form: 18 August 2021
Accepted: 24 November 2021
Published online: 11 January 2022

Abstract

Scenario simulations are the main tool for studying the impact of a nuclear reactor fleet on the related fuel cycle facilities. This equilibrium preliminary study aims to present the functionalities of a new tool and to show the wide variety of reactors/cycles/strategies that can be studied in steady state conditions and validated with more details thanks to dynamic code. Different types of scenario simulation tools have been developed at CEA over the years, this study focuses on dynamic and equilibrium codes. Dynamic fuel cycle simulation code models the ingoing and outgoing material flow in all the facilities of a nuclear reactor fleet and their evolutions through the different nuclear processes over a given period of time. Equilibrium fuel cycle simulation code models advanced nuclear fuel cycles in equilibrium conditions, i.e. in conditions which stabilize selected nuclear inventories such as spent nuclear fuel constituents, plutonium or some minor actinides. The principle of this work is to analyze different nuclear reactors (PWR, AMR) and several fuel types (UOX, MOX, ERU, MIX) to simulate advanced nuclear fleet with partial and fully plutonium and uranium multi-recycling strategies at equilibrium. At this first stage, selected results are compared with COSI6 simulations in order to evaluate the precision of this new tool, showing a significant general agreement.