Coupling Simulation Technologies to Assist in Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Facility Design

摘要

Metallic nuclear fuels composed of 70 wt% low-enriched uranium, 20 wt% weapons-grade plutonium, and 10 wt% elemental zirconium (U-20Pu-10Zr) or 90 wt% low-enriched uranium and 10 wt% elemental zirconium (U-10Zr) have been proposed as candidates to fuel the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) [ 1 ]. While U-20Pu-10Zr and U-10Zr fuels are proven to be viable and have been manufactured in the United States in the past, no current infrastructure exists which can produce them in quantities sufficient to support the operation of the VTR. The project needs to design a new fabrication facility to safely and sufficiently support the VTR mission [2].The above scenario presents us with the opportunity to explore how nuclear and operations engineering simulation tools can be jointly employed to assist in the design of nuclear fuel fabrication facilities. In this project, ORIGEN [3] and MCNP6 [4] nuclear analysis software are used to simulate the radioactive decay and resulting neutral particle transport of various nuclear fuels in a representative glovebox environment. From these models, estimates may be computed for the dose rates to workers handling these fuels at various stages in the fabrication process and criticality values can be determined.