Conceptual approaches and methods of treating the irradiated potential nuclear fuel

Various types of reactors are applied in the world nuclear power industry. One of the ways to implement the existing trend to increase the effectiveness of using nuclear fuel in nuclear power engineering is the growth of its burn-up fraction. The relevance of the research is caused by the problem related to increase of burn-up fraction depth both of normal nuclear fuel and new types of fuel, as well as by the necessity to develop the conceptually new approaches to handling such fuel in storage systems and transport means. The main aim of the research is to optimize the system parameters and schemes of handling in «dry» storage of spent fuel irradiated in uranium-graphite reactor of channel type. The methods. The research and numerical experiments were carried out with the assistance of verified computer codes programs based on the Monte Carlo method (MCU5TPU and Scale5), modern evaluated nuclear data library (ENDF/B-VIII, JENDL-3.3, JEFF 3.0, EXFOR, ROSFOND) and multi-group approximation. The sharing of the precise calculation program code of MCU and Scale allowed carrying out the verification of the obtained results of numerical experiments. The results. The authors have carried out the computational studies of the neutron-physical characteristics of the system of «dry» storage of spent nuclear fuel irradiated in the uranium-graphite reactor. Practical recommendations for optimizing the system parameters and schemes of handling and placement of spent fuel in a «dry» storage were developed. The system parameters and handling schemes in the process of «dry» storage of spent fuel optimized due to the alternating layers of placing fuel with different burn-up and enrichment. multiplying system