Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme

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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 4: Fissile Material and Proliferation Resistance

AGA 4.7: Talk

Thursday, March 5, 2009, 18:30–19:00, VMP 9 HS

Proliferation Risk of Plutonium Fuels: Burnup Calculations, with Particular Regard to Pu238 Fractions — •Moritz Kütt¹, Matthias Englert¹, Wolfgang Liebert¹, and Christoph Pistner² — ¹IANUS, TU-Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 4a, 64289 Darmstadt — ²Öko-Insitut e.V., Rheinstraße 95, 64295 Darmstadt

One solution, besides elimination or immobilization, to address the proliferation risk associated with existing plutonium stockpiles can be the use as fuel for energy production in light water reactors. To make plutonium fuel more proliferation resistant it is favorable to have a high percentage of Pu238 in the spent fuel which increases the heat development and the neutron rate of the plutonium significantly and makes it less usable for the construction of nuclear weapons. Different fuels were proposed to reach this goal and increase the Pu238 build up. Among them pure uranium or MOX fuels with a small percentage of U236 or plutonium in Inert Matrix Fuels (IMF) with or without additional minor actinides. To investigate the Pu238 buildup capability of these fuels, burnup calculations were performed with an improved version of the coupled neutronic and burnup code MCMATH. We present and compare the results for these fuel types with regard to the amount of Pu238 produced and proliferation relevant factors like the heat and neutron rate and the critical mass of plutonium generated after burn-up. The comparison shows that IMF fuels are favorable with regard to their proliferation resistance compared to MOX/pure uranium fuels.