Assessment of Enriched Uranium MOX Fuels for Plutonium Multi-Recycling in LWRs

Since 2019, the French government has adapted its mid-term nuclear energy policy, introducing a milestone to demonstrate the industrial feasibility to manage successive recycling of the plutonium issued from PWR spent fuels.This work presents some prospective core studies, focusing on the introduction of a specific multi-recycling fuel, called MIX (for MOX, with enriched uranium support fuel), into the future EPR2 French fleet.Assessment of both 100% MIX and partial 60% MIX/UOX cycles is presented, and discussion of the associated equilibrium cycle characteristics is given.We showed that the MIX fuel can be very easily adapted to more degraded Pu vectors, without any need to change the core loading pattern.