Neutronic evaluation of VVER fuel assembly with chemical spectral shift regulation

Abstract

The performance of the spectral shift control (SSC) method is evaluated and compared to the conventional poison method in the VVER-1000 fuel assembly design. The SSC method can be implemented by gradually adjusting the ratio of heavy water to light water moderator (D2O/H2O) during the fuel cycle. In this study, the efficiency of using the SSC design with or without a thermal absorber (gadolinium) is investigated. We apply the SSC with both 12 burnable absorber rods containing 4.0 wt.% Gd2O3 (Case 1) and without Gd2O3 (Case 2). The neutronic calculations indicate that the discharge burnup is enhanced by 60% and the conversion ratio (CR) is increased by 64.4% at the beginning of the cycle (BOC) compared to the benchmark data. The breeding of Pu239 and Pu241 is extended to 33.7% and 29.5%, respectively, for the SSC design case (2), and better utilization of U-235 and U-238 has been achieved compared to BM.