Issues for Effective Implementation of Burnup Credit

In the United States, burnup credit has been used in the criticality safety evaluation for storage pools at
pressurized water reactors (PWRs) and considerable work has been performed to lay the foundation for use of
burnup credit in dry storage and transport cask applications and permanent disposal applications. Many of the
technical issues related to the basic physics phenomena and parameters of importance are similar in each of these
applications. However, the nuclear fuel cycle in the United States has never been fully integrated and the
implementation of burnup credit to each of these applications is dependent somewhat on the specific safety bases
developed over the history of each operational area. This paper will briefly review the implementation status of
burnup credit for each application area and explore some of the remaining issues associated with effective
implementation of burnup credit.