ANALYSIS OF THE REACTIVITY COEFFICIENTS AND THE STABILITY OF A BWR LOADED WITH MOX FUEL

摘要

In the past few years, the use of MOX fuel in commercial nuclear power stations has beenrnconsidered in the western countries. France has already developed an extensive reprocessingrnprogram based on the use of uranium-plutonium mixed oxide fuel in PWRs. Whereas most of thernelectricity in France is provided by PWRs, the BWR type is predominantly used in USA, Japan,rnGermany, Sweden, and some of these countries plan to load MOX bundles in BWRs. The aim ofrnthis study is to model the impact of a core-loading pattern containing MOX bundles upon thernmain characteristics of a BWR (reactivity coefficients, stability).rnFor this purpose, the Studsvik Scandpower code package (CASMO-4/TABLES-3/SIMULATE-rn31-3) is used since it has been shown that these codes are able to accurately represent and modelrnMOX bundles. This study is thus devoted to the modelling of BWR cores (of the General ElectricrnBWR/6 type) loaded partially (approximately 2/3 of UOX bundles and 1/3 of MOX bundles) orrntotally with MOX bundles. The plutonium quality used is the Pu type 2016 (mostly Pu-239, 56%,rnand Pu-240, 26%), but a variation of the plutonium isotopic vector is also investigated, in case ofrna partial MOX loading. One notices that the reactivity coefficients do not show significantrnchanges in comparison with a full UOX loading. Nevertheless, two main problems arise: thernshutdown margin at BOC is lower than 1% and the stability to in-phase oscillations is decreased.