General philosophy on fuel management for burnup credit application

It has become clear to many of those who have studied burnup credit applications that one of the keys to the acceptance of this design consideration is fuel management. Few doubt the physics of reduced reactivity as a result of fission product poisoning and fissile material depletion. And clearly, few question our current or future ability to predict the keff of a fuel array within a cask. At issue is our confidence in the fuel management systems of the nuclear utilities that ensure that specification fuel is loaded into the cask or, perhaps more correctly, the items that assure that nonspecification fuel is not loaded into the cask. Non-specification is defined here as fresh or burned fuel with reactivity that exceeds the cask design basis. Incidentally, this definition should apply equally to burnup credit as it does to the fresh fuel assumption since misloading errors can occur in either case, although the probabilities of such occurrences are extremely low