Enriched Gadolinium as burnable absorber for PWR

This paper is a summary of a master of thesis work in reactor physics made by Ola Seveborn. The work was done at Vattenfall Braensle AB and Ola was guided through the work by the corresponding author of this paper. The results presented are calculations for Ringhals 3, which is a Westinghouse 3-loop PWR within the Vattenfall Group. The fuel is characterized by 17x17 assemblies of AFA type containing 3.80-3.95 w/o 235U and 8 rods containing 2 w/o Gadolinium with an enrichment of 70 w/o 157Gd. The calculations were performed with the Studsvik-Scandpower code package based on the CASMO-4 lattice code and the SIMULATE-3 nodal code. The results are compared to the corresponding calculations for fuel with 5 w/o gadolinium with natural isotopic constitution. The depletion of the cores was done separately for the reference and enriched case. The results show that the gains in average for the five cycles studied are about 70 EFPH per cycle. This is an effect of the lower gadolinium content needed. Also less parasitic absorption of enriched gadolinium in the end of the fuel life contributes to the increased cycle lengths. The abruptly increased reactivity and internal power peaking factor around 10 MWd/kgU do not affect the core design negatively. (authors)