Romania Monte Carlo Methods Application to CANDU Spent Fuel Comparative Analysis

Romania has a single NPP at Cernavoda with 5 PHWR reactors of CANDU6 type of 705 MW(e) each, with Cernavoda Unit1, operational starting from December 1996, Unit2 under construction while the remaining Unit3-5 is being conserved. The nuclear energy world wide development is accompanied by huge quantities of spent nuclear fuel accumulation. Having in view the possible impact upon population and environment, in all activities associated to nuclear fuel cycle, namely transportation, storage, reprocessing or disposal, the spent fuel characteristics must be well known. The paper aim is to apply Monte Carlo methods to CANDU spent fuel analysis, starting from the discharge moment, followed by spent fuel transport after a defined cooling period and finishing with the intermediate dry storage. As radiation source 3 CANDU fuels have been considered: standard 37 rods fuel bundle with natural UO2 and SEU fuels, and 43 rods fuel bundle with SEU fuel. After a criticality calculation using KENO-VI code, the criticality coefficient and the actinides and fission products concentrations are obtained. By using ORIGEN-S code, the photon source profiles are calculated and the spent fuel characteristics estimation is done. For the shielding calculations MORSE-SGC code has been used. Regarding to the spent fuel transport, the photon dose rates to the shipping cask wall and in air, at different distances from the cask, are estimated. The shielding calculation for the spent fuel intermediate dry storage is done and the photon dose rates at the storage basket wall (active element of the Cernavoda NPP intermediate dry storage) are obtained. A comparison between the 3 types of CANDU fuels is presented. (authors)