Physical mechanism analysis of burnup actinide composition in light water reactor MOX fuel and its application to uncertainty evaluation

Abstract In designing radioactive waste management and decommissioning facilities, understanding the physical mechanisms for burnup actinide composition is indispensable to satisfy requirements for its validity and reliability. Therefore, the uncertainty associated with physical quantities, such as nuclear data, needs to be quantitatively analyzed. The present paper illustrates an analysis methodology to investigate the physical mechanisms of burnup actinide composition with nuclear-data sensitivity based on the generalized depletion perturbation theory. The target in this paper is the MOX fuel of the light water reactor. We start with the discussion of the basic physical mechanisms for burnup actinide compositions using the reaction-rate flow chart on the burnup chain. After that, the physical mechanisms of the productions of Cm-244 and Pu-238 are analyzed in detail with burnup sensitivity calculation. Conclusively, we can identify the source of actinide productions and evaluate the indirect influence of the nuclear reactions if the physical mechanisms of burnup actinide composition are analyzed using the reaction-rate flow chart on the burnup chain and burnup sensitivity calculation. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the burnup sensitivity coefficients in an application to determine the priority of accuracy improvement in nuclear data in combination with the covariance of the nuclear data. In addition, the target actinides and reactions are categorized into patterns according to a sensitivity trend.