Comparison of Refueling Schemes for DUPIC Core

Abstract

A parametric study has been performed for the various refueling schemes of CANDU 6reactor loaded with reference DUPIC fuel. The optimum discharge burnup was determined suchthat the peak bundle power is minimized for the equilibrium core. Based on the results ofinstantaneous core calculation using patterned random age distributions, it was decided to performthe refueling simulations only for 2-bundle and 4-bundle shift refueling schemes. The 600 FPDsimulation has shown that the operational margins of the channel and bundle power to the licenselimits are 7.9% and 17.1 %, respectively, for 2-bundle shift refueling scheme. The 4-bundle shiftrefueling scheme also satisfies the license limits and the operational margins of the channel andbundle power are 7.1% and 9.8%, respectively. The results of refueling simulation indicate thepossibility of using reference DUPIC fuel in current CANDU 6 reactor.