Abstract
A new type of low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel based on an alloy of uranium and molybdenum is expected to allow the conversion of U.S. domestic high-performance research and test reactors requiring high density fuel from highly enriched uranium (HEU) to LEU. The University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR®) has undergone design and performance calculations for conversion to this LEU fuel. Presented in this paper is the analysis of a crucial step in the conversion process: the sequence of MURR transition cores from all fresh to equilibrium burnup LEU operations. During the initial conversion from HEU to LEU fuel, MURR will operate atypically due to the lack of burned LEU elements. Given the constraints of MURR operation and experiments, a proposed transition scheme minimizes the time MURR operates atypically compared to the prototypic cycles currently run with HEU fuel and moves quickly to the same sort of equilibrium cycles for the LEU fuel.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the expert assistance of Kiratadas Kutikkad of MURR in understanding the current fuel management utilized at MURR that was key in development of the optimization algorithms used in this work. This research is sponsored at the University of Missouri by the U.S. Department of Energy, NNSA M3 Reactor Conversion Program under contract 7J-30010 with ANL. The submitted manuscript has been created by UChicago Argonne, LLC, operator of ANL, which is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory and is operated under contract number DE-AC02-06CH11357. The U.S. Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan. http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan