Evaluation and Parameter Analysis of Burn up Calculations for the Assessment of Radioactive Waste - 13187
- Product Quality Control Office for Radioactive Waste (PKS) at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research, Nuclear Waste Management and Reactor Safety Research, IEK-6, Forschungszentrum Juelich (Germany)
Burn up calculations facilitate a determination of the composition and nuclear inventory of spent nuclear fuel, if operational history is known. In case this information is not available, the total nuclear inventory can be determined by means of destructive or, even on industrial scale, nondestructive measurement methods. For non-destructive measurements however only a few easy-to-measure, so-called key nuclides, are determined due to their characteristic gamma lines or neutron emission. From these measured activities the fuel burn up and cooling time are derived to facilitate the numerical inventory determination of spent fuel elements. Most regulatory bodies require an independent assessment of nuclear waste properties and their documentation. Prominent part of this assessment is a consistency check of inventory declaration. The waste packages often contain wastes from different types of spent fuels of different history and information about the secondary reactor parameters may not be available. In this case the so-called characteristic fuel burn up and cooling time are determined. These values are obtained from a correlations involving key-nuclides with a certain bandwidth, thus with upper and lower limits. The bandwidth is strongly dependent on secondary reactor parameter such as initial enrichment, temperature and density of the fuel and moderator, hence the reactor type, fuel element geometry and plant operation history. The purpose of our investigation is to look into the scaling and correlation limitations, to define and verify the range of validity and to scrutinize the dependencies and propagation of uncertainties that affect the waste inventory declarations and their independent verification. This is accomplished by numerical assessment and simulation of waste production using well accepted codes SCALE 6.0 and 6.1 to simulate the cooling time and burn up of a spent fuel element. The simulations are benchmarked against spent fuel from the real reactor Obrigheim in Germany for which sufficiently precise experimental reference data are available. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, 1628 E. Southern Avenue, Suite 9-332, Tempe, AZ 85282 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22224951
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-13-WM-13187; TRN: US14V0394045906
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM2013: Waste Management Conference: International collaboration and continuous improvement, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 24-28 Feb 2013; Other Information: Country of input: France; 8 refs.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
BURNUP
COOLING TIME
CORRELATIONS
DENSITY
ENRICHMENT
EVALUATION
INVENTORIES
ISOTOPES
MODERATORS
NEUTRON EMISSION
NUMERICAL ANALYSIS
RADIOACTIVE WASTES
SIMULATION
SPENT FUEL ELEMENTS
SPENT FUELS