Assessing UN Neutronic and Fuel Performance for Extended Cycle Lengths

Funding

As part of the work supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear FY 2021 Voucher, Constellation and Oak Ridge National Laboratory entered into a cooperative research and development agreement to evaluate various conceptual advanced nuclear fuel pellet designs (ANFPDs). Understanding the advantage of loading these conceptual fuel designs into the core is crucial for the entire US light water reactor (LWR) fleet. The advanced modeling and simulation capabilities developed under the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs (CASL) were utilized to perform a series of coupled neutronic and thermal hydraulic calculations, as well as fuel performance calculations. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-