Revision of the Fuel Management Studies of the Atucha-2 Reactor. Implementation of an Automatic Refuelling Simulation Program.

Abstract

Atucha-2 is a 745 MWe (gross) nuclear station, pressure vessel type designed by Siemens (Germany), moderated and cooled with heavy water, located 120 km NW from Buenos Aires. This work presents the results of a revision of the fuel management strategy. For some of these studies, REC_AUT, a Fortran 90 program, was implemented to perform detailed refuelling simulations with automatic selection of the channels to be refuelled. This program showed very good agreement with detailed simulations done with manual channel selection and permitted to reduce significantly the time required for this type of studies. This new tool was successfully used in the redesign of the fuel management strategy because of a reduction of the thermo-hydraulics channel power limits.