Reactor fuel depletion benchmark of TINDER

Accurate burnup calculations are key to proper nuclear reactor design, fuel cycle modeling, and disposal estimations. The TINDER code, originally designed for activation analyses, has been modified to handle full burnup calculations, including the widely used predictor-corrector feature. In order to properly characterize the performance of TINDER for this application, a benchmark calculation was performed. Although the results followed the trends of past benchmarked codes for a UO2 PWR fuel sample from the Takahama-3 reactor, there were obvious deficiencies in the final result, likely in the nuclear data library that was used. Isotopic comparisons versus experiment and past code benchmarks are given, as well as hypothesized areas of deficiency and future work.