The effect of changing enrichments on core performance

The information presented in this paper has been developed as a follow on to two previous papers published using the same low leakage core configuration with the addition in this paper of evaluating fuel costs. The two previous publications studied the characteristics of this low leakage core with two different enrichment sets, where each enrichment set represents the three batches in the core. The purpose of the two previous papers proved the effectiveness of using the Haling Power Depletion (HPD) method as a guide. The first purpose of this paper is to extend this study to higher enrichment sets to finally attain a core having close to the highest possible cycle length. Three additional similar enrichment sets are studied increasing the number of enrichment sets to five. The ratio between the enrichment sets was maintained constant except for the highest enrichment set. This was done to increase the cycle length to approximately the longest possible cycle length of 800 days for a 1000 MWe reactor limited to a maximum 5% enrichment. The core reactor physics characteristics of these five cores are presented in this paper together with the evaluating of the fuel costs. These core characteristics include radial power fractions (RPF), Haling Power Depletion, RPF distributions, maximum pin peak powers (PPPMAX), and other important data. The HPD RPFs of all 5 cores were similar and used to help develop the burnable poison placement designs for each core. The longest two cycles required an improved technique using more information than the HPD results to develop successful BP placement designs. Also, it was very difficult to find the correct soluble boron ppmB in the HPD input to have the Studvik HPD calculation converge. There is an error in this algorithm. The fuel costs for the five cores were calculated and the results prove that the fuel costs are lower with the cores having the longest cycle lengths. The details observed in this study are presented in this paper.