The Reducibility of Reactor Physics Depletion and Decay Calculation

Depletion and decay calculations are integral part of reactor physics calculations, necessary to estimate fuel characteristics following a given exposure to radiation. Given the complexity of reactor design and the unprecedented sophistication of the new high fidelity modeling and simulation tools, attempting to calculate a very accurate estimation of fuel characteristics on a pin-by-pin level, there is an ever-increasing need to perform these calculations in a computationally efficient manner. This summary presents a new enabling methodology to achieve higher computational gains while addressing one of the fundamental challenges of existing methods, that is how to preserve the accuracy of the original high fidelity models. This is difficult with current approaches relying on look-up tables or the elimination of non-influential isotopes. To achieve that we employ a reduced order modeling approach which reduces the effective dimensionality of the solution space, represented by the number of tracked nuclides. This approach allows the analyst to devise a user-defined level of reduction supported by rigorous error bounds that quantify the accuracy of the reduced model. This summary explores this new methodology by calculating the effective dimensionality for representative BWR depletion problems that are required to meet user-defined accuracy for the nuclides concentrations. (authors)