Effect of heterogeneity in plutonium recycling in steady state PWR
Résumé
The possible delay of decades for the deployment of fourth generation reactors brings up
new issues. Countries like France which are storing Plutonium for years in prediction of
starting FBR could have to adapt their plutonium management strategy.
We have compared different strategies for plutonium recycling in PWR reactors. We have
chosen to limit the scope of this study to PWRs considering the standard uranium cycle,
and we investigated the influence of the heterogeneity in the assembly that would contain
the recycled plutonium. The comparison of different strategies is made at steady-state.
This paper present a specific method developed to allow complete and detailed studies
of equilibrium scenarios and how it has been implemented and integrated inside the opensource
MURE package.
We will then discuss of the results obtained through this method apply to PWRs loaded
with homogeneous and heterogeneous assemblies using the following criteria: resource
consumption, Pu inventories in the cycle and waste production