Improving the useful life of a 37-element fuel bundle

Abstract

Preliminary results indicate that CANDU burnup using 37-element fuel bundle with a slight enrichment can improve the useful life in the core. A slight enrichment in this study is increasing U-235 from 0.72 to 0.9 mass percent. A parametric study on criticality using Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's WIMS_AECL 3.1 and the Monte Carlo code, MCNP 5, developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, is presented in this paper.