The Effects Of Transmutation Of MA On PWR Fuel Cycle

With the rapid development of nuclear power industry,people pay more attention to the spent fuel reprocessing.The Minor Actinides(MA),a long-lived and high-level radioactive nuclides consituent the most important parts in the nuclear spent fuel.MA can be transmuted into stable or short-lived nuclides by neutron irradiation,and this is the most effective way to manage those high-level wastes.Pressurized water reactor is the popular commercial reactors operation in China and its technologies are mature,therefore the study the transmutation of the MA in the pressurized water reactor has an important significance and is feasible under current reactor technologies.In this paper,we study the influenceon fuel cycle after loading MA transmutation materials in the PWR.We uniformly mix the MA with four types of proportion and then add it to the burnable poison of burnable posion rods.We use the DRAGON to build a model of the PWR fuel assembly and calculated the impacts on the fuel burnup,the fuel cycle,the k-effective of the fuel assembly and core lifetime when the MA uniformly mixed with the burnable poison.Then we propose that we use the MA transmutation rods to substitute for the burnable poison in the fuel assembly.In this plan,we study the fuel burnup,the fuel cycle and core lifetime to validate its feasibility.We also calculate the transmutation rate of the MA after irradiation in the reactor and analyze the transmutation features and the results.We also compare the influence of different mixing ratio and adding proportion in order to obtain "the optimal solution of the problem".The results show that:when the MA is added to the burnable poison,burnup level of the fuel assembly decreases and the fuel cycle of the core become longer.It also has an impact on the k-effective of the fuel assembly,extending the time of the fuel assembly maintaining above the criticality and has a favorable impact on core lifetime.When we use the MA transmutation rods to replace the burnable poison in the fuel assembly,the fuel cycle of the core and the time of the fuel assembly maintaining above the critical lengthen.