Cost-reduced depletion calculation including short half-life nuclides for nuclear fuel cycle simulation

ABSTRACT

The Okamura explicit method (OEM) for depletion calculation was developed by modifying the matrix exponential method for dynamic nuclear fuel cycle simulation. The OEM suppressed the divergence of the calculation for short half-life nuclides, even for the longer time step length or the small number of time steps. The computational cost of the OEM was small, equivalent to the Euler method, and it maintained sufficient accuracy for the fuel cycle simulation.

Graphical abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear fuel cycle simulation
• burnup calculation
• matrix exponential method
• okamura explicit method
• short half-life nuclide

Acknowledgments

This work was conducted through the “Development of evaluation method of mass-balance in back-end process of the nuclear fuel cycle and implementation to NMB code-1,2,3” project, a collaborative research effort between Tokyo Institute of Technology and Japan Atomic Energy Agency funded by the Laboratory for Advanced Nuclear Energy, Tokyo Institute of Technology (2019-11, 2020-14, 2021-10). In addition, this work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellows (20J14956).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2022.2131646

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS [20J14956]; Laboratory for Advanced Nuclear Energy [2019-11, 2020-14, 2021-10].