MOX Fuel Alternatives for Minor Actinides Burnup in Thermal Spectrum

Abstract

The strategy used in this work was the following; first, it was necessary to establish the material of study for the actinides generation. This material was the commercial uranium oxide fuel and take it as a reference, then to design a MOX fuel cell. Starting with the uranium oxide fuel, this MOX design was made scaling the radial uranium enrichments to plutonium concentrations making use of a Fissile Material Ratio (FMR) which was found in previous work as the equivalent in a MOX fuel cycle. It is a relation between the uranium enrichments to concentrations of reactor grade plutonium, to obtain the MOX fuel cell [2]. In the MOX fuel cell, the gadolinium rods remains without changes as in the case of the UOX fuel assembly, with all this made we get a reference for the UOX and MOX fuel cells.Taken the first MOX fuel cell as model, we replace eight fuel rods by water rods to increase the moderator to fuel ratio and determine the actinides production, the results obtained are shown in section 6.A flow diagram of the calculations made in this paper is shown in Figure 1.