Canflex: A fuel bundle to facilitate the use of enrichment and fuel cycles in CANDU reactors

The neutron economy of the CANDU reactor results in it being an ideal host for a number of resource-conserving fuel cycles, as well as a number of potential ''symbiotic'' fuel cycles, in which fuel discharged from light-water cooled reactors is recycled to extract the maximum energy from the residual fissile material before it is sent for disposal. The resource conserving fuel cycles include the natural-uranium, slightly-enriched-uranium and thorium fuel cycles. The ''LWR-symbiotic'' cycles include recovered uranium and various options for the direct use of spent LWR fuel in CANDU reactors. However, to achieve the maximum economic potential of these fuel-cycle options requires irradiation to burnups higher than that possible with natural uranium. To provide a basis for the economic use of these fuel cycles, a program is underway to develop and demonstrate a CANDU fuel bundle capable of both higher burnups and greater operating margins. This new bundle design is being developed jointly by AECL and KAERI, and uses smaller-diameter fuel elements in the outer ring of a 43-element bundle to reduce the maximum element ratings in a CANDU fuel bundle by 20% compared to the 37-element bundle currently in use. This allows operation to burnups greater than 21 MWd/KgU. A combination of this lower peak-element rating, plus development work underway at AECL to enhance the thermalhydraulic characteristics of the bundle (including both critical heat flux and bundle pressure drop), provides a greater operating margin for the bundle. This new bundle design is called CANFLEX, and the program for its development in Canada and Korea is described in this paper. (author). 19 refs, 5 figs