Bi-content Gadolinia as Burnable Absorber in PWR to Improve the Reactor Core Behaviour

The gadolinia product is one of the standard burnable absorbers used in the PWR long and low leakage fuel cycle in order to control the radial power distribution and to hold down the initial core reactivity. This product presents a large number of advantages such as the high efficiency with only a small number of gadolinia-bearing rods, the easy adjustment between the number and the content of the gadolinia-bearing rods according to the cycle length need and the initial reactivity hold-down, no increasing of boron concentration versus cycle depletion, no additional increasing of internal pressure in poisoned rods, very low additional manufacture cost. On the other hand, some unfavourable phenomena are also observed during the utilization of the gadolinia: amplification of the asymmetrical power distribution and more negative axial offset. Based on the correlation between the gadolinia burnout and its content, the use of gadolinia bi-content will improve the parameters indicated here above. The gadolinia bi-content have been used in BWR for more than 20 years. In this paper, the comparison of the main reactor core physical parameters in PWR, calculated with the AREVA NP standard neutronic code package SCIENCE, is made by using the mono- and bi-content of the gadolinia products in the same fuel assembly. The results show that the asymmetrical axial and azimuthal power distribution can be improved in the case of the bi-content gadolinia product. (authors)