Download or read book Comparative Analysis of Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles Over Limited Time Horizons written by Lawrence Fernando Bronk and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nuclear power currently produces approximately 20% of all U.S. commercial electric energy and is the leading source of carbon-free energy production. It is well known that the current uranium-oxide (UOX) fuel cycle produces large quantities of transuranic (TRU) materials in the form of "nuclear waste". Reducing the quantity of the long lived radioisotopes contained within the spent fuel as well as increasing resource utilization will be fundamental necessities for ensuring the viability of nuclear power. Inert matrix fuels (IMF) could potentially allow current generation light-water reactors to achieve a significant reduction in the amount of transuranic waste that is currently being generated as a byproduct of the UOX cycle. To characterize the relative performance of an IMF system to other TRU reduction systems currently under consideration by the Department of Energy, such as a fast burner reactor (FBR), we performed a fuel cycle simulation. Using ORIGEN 2.2 and an in-house developed collision probability code, VBUDS, we compared each cycle's actinide burning abilities over a 100 year time period by generating an endpoint discharge isotopic vector for each. We also performed a sensitivity study of an IMF system to the beginning of life fuel composition. We have found that a one pass IMF system with a burn up of 750 MWd/kg will perform comparably to a FBR in recycle system with a burn up of 140 MWd/kg, where the FBR system slightly outperforms the IMF system. An IMF system using a burn of 850 MWd/kg will almost always outperform the FBR cycle, especially if there is an active cooling period after the nuclear waste is emplaced. The IMF sensitivity study found that the decay heat of the IMF systems, 750 MWd/kg and 850 MWd/kg, was largely unaffected by the burn up or cooling period of the UOX spent fuel used to make the IMF.