Assessment of plutonium inventory management in the french nuclear fleet with the fuel cycle simulator CLASS

Abstract The ASTRID French project aimed at designing, building and operating a sodium fast reactor cooled with liquid sodium. One of the goals of the project was to demonstrate the feasibility of the plutonium multi-recycling in a fast spectrum. Commissariat a l’energie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA - Atomic & Alternative Energies Commission) has recently announced the abandon of the project which involves that no sodium fast reactor project is planned in France. As a consequence, there is a real interest in assessing technical feasibility for alternative plutonium management. In this work, the plutonium multi-recycling in PWR is assessed from fuel cycle simulations performed with the library CLASS developed by CNRS/IN2P3. The technical conditions for plutonium incineration and stabilization are investigated. It is shown that plutonium can be stabilized with 30% of PWR using multi-reprocessed plutonium in MOX fuel, the rest being composed by PWR loaded with UOX. The transuranic (plutonium and minor actinides) stabilization involves a plutonium incineration. For this reason, around 50% of PWR using multi-reprocessed plutonium is required and the nuclear power has to decrease. In this paper, the methodology and the output analysis are described in detail.