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.
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.
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