Nuclide Importance to Criticality Safety, Decay Heating, and Source Terms Related to Transport and Interim Storage of High-Burnup LWR Fuel

This report investigates trends in the radiological decay properties and changes in relative nuclide importance associated with increasing enrichments and burnup for spent LWR fuel as they affect the areas of criticality safety, thermal analysis (decay heat), and shielding analysis of spent fuel transport and storage casks. To facilitate identifying the changes in the spent fuel compositions that most directly impact these application areas, the dominant nuclides in each area have been identified and ranked by importance. The importance is investigated as a function of increasing burnup to assist in identifying the key changes in spent fuel characteristics between conventional- and extended-burnup regimes. Studies involving both pressurizedwater-reactor (PWR) fuel assemblies and boiling-water-reactor (BWR) assemblies are included. This study is seen to be a necessary first step in identifying the high-burnup spent fuel characteristics that may adversely affect the accuracy of current computational methods and data, assess the potential impact on previous guidance on isotopic source terms and decay-heat values, and thus help identify areas for methods and data improvement. Finally, several recommendations on the direction of possible future code validation efforts for high-burnup spent fuel predictions are presented.
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