Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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LEU+ loaded APR1400 using accident tolerant fuel cladding for 24-month two-batch fuel management scheme

  • Husam Khalefih (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)) ;
  • Taesuk Oh (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)) ;
  • Yunseok Jeong (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)) ;
  • Yonghee Kim (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST))
  • Received : 2023.01.31
  • Accepted : 2023.04.06
  • Published : 2023.07.25
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Abstract

In this work, a 24-month two-batch fuel management strategy for the APR1400 using LEU + has been investigated, where enrichments of 5.9 and 5.2 w/o are utilized in lieu of the conventional 4-5 w/o UO2 fuel. In addition, an Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) clad based on the swaging technology is applied to APR1400 fuel assemblies. In this special ATF clad design, both outer and inner SS316 layers protect the conventional zircaloy clad. Erbia (Er2O3) is introduced as a burnable absorber with two-fold goals to lower the critical boron concentration in the long-cycle LEU + loaded core as well as to handle the LEU + fuel in the existing front-end fuel facilities without renewing the license. Two types of fuel assemblies with different loading of gadolinia (Gd2O3) are considered to control both the reactivity and the core radial power distribution. The erbia burnable absorber is uniformly admixed with UO2 in all fuel pins except for the gadolinia-bearing ones. In this study, two core designs were devised with different erbia loading, and core performance and safety parameters were evaluated for each case in comparison with a core design without any burnable absorbers. The core analysis was done using the two-step method. First, cross-sections are generated by the SERPENT 2 Monte Carlo code, and the 3-D neutronic analysis is performed with an in-house multi-physics nodal code KANT.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MSIT) (RS-2022-00144429, and 2022M2E9A304619011).

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