Impact of Fuel Loading Models on Fuel Cycle Dynamic Simulations

This paper shows how important fuel loading models are in nuclear scenario simulations as soon as material recycling, such as plutonium in MOX fuels, are involved.These models aim to identify the fresh fuel composition at each reactor loading in a scenario describing the nuclear fleet evolution.The paper focuses on plutonium recycling in PWRs on a simple academic study and considers several criteria for identifying the right amount of plutonium to be loaded in a given reactor at a given time.These criteria depend on the level of precision and complexity of the reactor modeling, which, historically, was based on infinite assembly depletion calculations.However, in recent years, improved reactor models based on 3D full-core simulations have been developed.This study shows the compromise between the accuracy of the reactor modeling, its numerical costs and the biases implied in a fuel cycle simulation.