24-Month Operating Cycle Containing Gadolinium Integral Burnable Absorbers for NPP Krško

Abstract

A few years ago Westinghouse innovations in PWR technology resulted in a proposal for a new type of integral fuel burnable absorbers containing Gadolinium. Preliminary designs of loading patterns for NPP Krško were made for 18 month fuel cycles with standard VANTAGE+ fuel type containing Integral Fuel Burnable Absorbers (IFBA) with enriched Boron, as well as newly proposed Gadolinium based absorbers. In this paper we investigate the possibility to design 24 month cycle for the NPP Krško with VANTAGE+ fuel type and Gadolinium based integral absorbers. The key fuel cycle parameters are compared to the one based on IFBAs. The analysis is performed by the latest version of FUMACS code package capable of simulating Gadolinium based integral fuel burnable absorbers.