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Title: Development and Applications of a Prototypic SCALE Control Module for Automated Burnup Credit Analysis

Conference ·
OSTI ID:788631
 [1];  [1]
  1. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Consideration of the depletion phenomena and isotopic uncertainties in burnup-credit criticality analysis places an increasing reliance on computational tools and significantly increases the overall complexity of the calculations. An automated analysis and data management capability is essential for practical implementation of large-scale burnup credit analyses that can be performed in a reasonable amount of time. STARBUCS is a new prototypic analysis sequence being developed for the SCALE code system to perform automated criticality calculations of spent fuel systems employing burnup credit. STARBUCS is designed to help analyze the dominant burnup credit phenomena including spatial burnup gradients and isotopic uncertainties. A search capability also allows STARBUCS to iterate to determine the spent fuel parameters (e.g., enrichment and burnup combinations) that result in a desired keff for a storage configuration. Although STARBUCS was developed to address the analysis needs for spent fuel transport and storage systems, it provides sufficient flexibility to allow virtually any configuration of spent fuel to be analyzed, such as storage pools and reprocessing operations. STARBUCS has been used extensively at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to study burnup credit phenomena in support of the NRC Research program.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
788631
Report Number(s):
P01-111304; TRN: US0200533
Resource Relation:
Conference: 2001 ANS Embedded Topical Meeting on Practical Implementation of Nuclear Criticality Safety, Reno, NV (United States), 11-15 Nov 2001; Other Information: PBD: 20 Jul 2001
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English