Recycling heterogeneous americium targets in a boiling water reactor

One of the limiting contributors to the heat load constraint for a long term spent fuel repository is the decay of americium-241. A possible option to reduce the heat load produced by Am-241 is to eliminate it via transmutation in a light water reactor thermal neutron environment, in particular, by taking advantage of the large thermal fission cross section of Am-242 and Am-242m. In this study we employ lattice loading optimization techniques to define the loadings and arrangements of fuel pins with blended americium and uranium oxide in boiling water reactor bundles, specifically, by defining the incineration of pre-loaded americium as an objective function to maximize americium transmutation. Subsequently, the viability of these optimized lattices is tested by assembling them into bundles with Am-spiked fuel pins and by loading these bundles into realistic three-dimensional BWR core-wide simulations that model multiple reload cycles and observe standard operational constraints. These simulations are possible via our collaboration with the Westinghouse Electric Co. which facilitates the use of industrial-caliber design tools such as the PHOENIX-4/POLCA-7 sequence and the Core Master 2© GUI work environment for fuel management.The resulting analysis confirms the ability to axially uniformly eliminating roughly 90% of the pre-loaded inventory of recycled Am-241 in BWR bundles with heterogeneous target pins. This high level of incineration was achieved within three to four 18-month operational cycles, which is equivalent to a typical in-core residence time of a BWR bundle.