In-core power sharing and fuel requirement study for a decommissioning Boiling Water Reactor using the linear reactivity model

A study of in-core power sharing and fuel requirement for a decommissioning BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) was carried out using the linear reactivity model (LRM). The power sharing of each fuel batch was taken as an independent variable, and the related parameters were set and modified to simulate actual cases. Optimizations of the last cycle and two cycles before decommissioning were both implemented; in the last-one-cycle optimization, a single cycle optimization was carried out with different upper limits of fuel batch power, whereas, in the two-cycle optimization, two cycles were optimized with different cycle lengths, along with two different optimization approaches which are the simultaneous optimization of two cycles (MO) and two successive single-cycle optimizations (SO). The results of the last-one-cycle optimization show that it is better to increase the fresh fuel power and decrease the thrice-burnt fuel power as much as possible. It also shows that relaxing the power limit is good to the fresh fuel requirement which will be reduced under lower power limit. On the other hand, the results of the last-two-cycle (cycle N-1 and N) optimization show that the MO is better than SO, and the power of fresh fuel batch should be decreased in cycle N-1 to save its energy for the next cycle. The results of the single-cycle optimization are found to be the same as that in cycle N of the multi-cycle optimization. Besides that, under the same total energy requirement of two cycles, a long-short distribution of cycle length design can save more fresh fuel.