Physics challenges for advanced fuel cycle assessment

Abstract

Advanced fuel cycles and associated optimized reactor designs will require substantial improvements in key research area to meet new and more challenging requirements. The present paper reviews challenges and issues in the field of reactor and fuel cycle physics. Typical examples are discussed with, in some cases, original results.

Plutonium fingerprinting in nuclear forensics of spent nuclear fuel

“…In the case of the conceptual spent fuels, these were simulated for the following cases of reactors and commercial and emerging fresh fuel compositions (Koch and Nicolaou, 1993;Salvatores et al, 2015):…”

Trends and Perspectives on Nuclear Waste Management: Recovering, Recycling and Reusing

“…Compared with a today's traditional SNR , a FNR can utilise the 238 U about 60 times more efficiently, converting such otherwise useless isotope into the fissile 239 Pu. [76]. Moreover, the capabilities of FNRs enable them to run consuming fuel that has been recycled many times.…”

“…The transmutation processes will be instead an integral part of the closed fuel cycles in specifically designed fast neutron reactors or in the accelerator-driven systems (ADS), where fluxes of high-energy neutrons are produced by spallation [46,47,[75][76][77].…”