Validation of SCALE (SAS2H) isotopic predictions for BWR spent fuel

Abstract

Thirty spent fuel samples obtained from boiling-water-reactor (BWR) fuel pins have been modeled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory using the SAS2H sequence of the SCALE code system. The SAS2H sequence uses transport methods combined with the depletion and decay capabilities of the ORIGEN-S code to estimate the isotopic composition of fuel as a function of its burnup history. Results of these calculations are compared with chemical assay measurements of spent fuel inventories for each sample. Results show reasonable agreement between measured and predicted isotopic concentrations for important actinides; however, little data are available for most fission products considered to be important for spent fuel concerns (e.g., burnup credit, shielding, source-term calculations, etc.). This work is a follow-up to earlier works that studied the ability to predict spent fuel compositions in pressurized-water-reactor (PWR) fuel pins. Biases and uncertainties associated with BWR isotopic predictions are found to be larger than those of PWR calculations. Such behavior is expected, as the operation of a BWR is significantly more complex than that of a PWR plant, and in general the design of a BWR has a more heterogeneous configuration than that of a PWR. Nevertheless, this work shows that the simple models employed using SAS2H to represent such complexities result in agreement to within 5% (and often less than 1%) or less for most nuclides important for spent fuel applications. On the other hand, however, the set of fuel samples analyzed represent a small subset of the BWR fuel population, and results reported herein may not be representative of the full population of BWR spent fuel