SunFast: An interactive workstation code for PWR fuel management

Fuel management decisions for pressurized water reactors (PWRs) are quite formidable because of the large number of possible fuel reloading patterns and burnable poison distributions. Therefore, a nuclear engineer must repeatedly perform diffusion calculations for a variety of different operating strategies to determine an optimum core reload. Methods applied to fulfill final design specifications and licensing restrictions are prohibitively expensive and time consuming and are inappropriate for evaluations during the early stages of the reload design process. Fuel cycle scoping calculations are performed to eliminate many of the early alternative strategies. For efficient modeling, core prediction codes used for such analyses should take advantage of the interactive capabilities that work-stations offer. SunFast (Sun fuel analysis scoping tool) facilitates nuclear fuel analysis by taking advantage of recent developments in modern workstations, especially the use of the graphical user interface (GUI). The scoping problem is ideal for implementation in an interactive environment because it inherently requires a considerable amount of man/machine interaction. The challenge is to incorporate features into the scoping program that make the most effective use of the hardware and software capabilities of the modern workstation computer.