ANALYSES OF FUEL BURNUP CALCULATIONS OF KARTINI REACTOR BASED ON THE NEW CALCULATION SCHEME

Abstract

ABSTRACT

ANALYSES OF FUEL BURNUP CALCULATIONS OF KARTINI REACTOR BASED ON THE NEW CALCULATION SCHEME. It has been described a new scheme of fuel burnup calculation, intended to improve the present practice used at Kartini reactor. The improvement includes the use of power distributions, which will be used as the base for estimating the burnup of each individual fuel element, and the inclusion of epithermal neutron which will affect to the burnup rates and the total fuel consumed. A small computation program was then made to perform calculations based on the two calculation schemes, and to see the differences. The results indicate that the proposed scheme results in higher estimated value against that of the present scheme, and the differences tends to increase linearly with the cumulative burnups. For each cumulative burnup of 30 MWD the difference could reach about 9.87 % which is around 3.7 gram for the whole core. It can be concluded that the proposed approach could improve the present’s practice of burnup estimation, especially for each individual fuel element which is important to the in-core fuel management program.