Publications associées à Combustible MOX

Atomic level insight into irradiation effects in nuclear fuel materials

Microstructural evolution during in-pile irradiation, radiation damage effects and fission products behavior in UO2 nuclear fuel are key issues in understanding and for the modeling of the performance as well as safety characteristics of nuclear fuels in t ...

EPFL2024

Innovative thermophysical characterization of an ATF composite cladding: the case of silicon carbide

Andrea Cavaliere

Nuclear power is a powerful technology that plays an important role in the fight against climate change, and research is continuously engaged in studies that could further improve its safety. After the Fukushima accident, Accident Tolerant Fuels research h ...

EPFL2024

Shear strength and shear stiffness analysis of compacted Wyoming-type bentonite

Alessio Ferrari

Wyoming-type bentonite is one of the materials to be used as part of the Engineered Barrier System (EBS) in deep geological disposal facilities for the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel.In the KBS-3 type repository, the canisters containing the spent fue ...

ELSEVIER2023

Extension of the OFFBEAT fuel performance code to finite strains and validation against LOCA experiments

Andreas Pautz, Carlo Fiorina, Alessandro Scolaro, Edoardo Luciano Brunetto

The mechanical analysis of nuclear fuel behavior under base-irradiation conditions has traditionally been performed adopting the small-strain approximation. However, many cases of interest for fuel behavior involve the occurrence of large rod deformations ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2023

Gamma-Blind Fast Neutron Detection for Spent Nuclear Fuel Characterization

Alexander Wolfertz

In this thesis, the development and testing of a system for measuring the axial distribution of fast neutron emission of spent nuclear fuel rods is presented. Emphasis is placed on the novel fast neutron detector used which can reliably work in extremely h ...

EPFL2023

Monte Carlo analysis of BWR geometries using a cycle check-up methodology

Mathieu Hursin, Hakim Ferroukhi, Dimitri Rochman, Abdelhamid Dokhane, Alexander Vasiliev

Recent fuel anomalies at a Swiss power plant have motivated the development at PSI of the "Cycle Check-Up" (CHUP) methodology which consists in performing Monte Carlo transport calculations using nuclide compositions and thermal-hydraulic boundary conditio ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2023

Validation of spent nuclear fuel decay heat calculations using Polaris, ORIGEN and CASMO5

Andreas Pautz, Dimitri Rochman, Stefano Caruso

Decay heat calculations of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) using Polaris and ORIGEN codes in the SCALE code sys-tem, and CASMO5 code, are validated using measurements from the Clab and GE-Morris facilities. Multiple hypothesis testing, relying on permutations and ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022

Data-Driven Predictive Models: Calculational Bias in Characterization of Spent Nuclear Fuel

Characteristics of the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) are typically calculated, requiring validation a priori. The validation process relies on the difference between calculations and measurements, namely the bias. Usually, predicting the bias based on benchmark ...

EPFL2022

Investigation of the density shoulder formation by using self-consistent simulations of plasma turbulence and neutral kinetic dynamics

Paolo Ricci, Davide Mancini, Nicola Vianello, Maurizio Giacomin

Simulations of plasma turbulence in a lower single-null magnetic configurations are presented. The plasma dynamics is modelled by the drift-reduced two-fluid Braginskii equations that are coupled with a kinetic model for a single neutral species that consi ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2021

Structural performance and mechanical properties investigation of spent nuclear fuel rods under static and dynamic bending loads

Efstathios Vlassopoulos

Currently, most Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) is kept safely in storage either at on-site facilities or at centralized interim storage sites. Moreover, many countries face delays in implementing their waste management programmes for SNF and high-level waste dis ...

EPFL2021

Uncertainty analyses of spent nuclear fuel decay heat calculations using SCALE modules

Andreas Pautz, Dimitri Rochman, Stefano Caruso

Decay heat residuals of spent nuclear fuel (SNF), i.e., the differences between calculations and measurements, were obtained previously for various spent fuel assemblies (SFA) using the Polaris module of the SCALE code system. In this paper, we compare dec ...

2021

Optimisation of used nuclear fuel canister loading using a neural network and genetic algorithm

Andreas Pautz, Hakim Ferroukhi, Dimitri Rochman, Alexander Vasiliev

This paper presents an approach for the optimisation of geological disposal canister loadings, combining high resolution simulations of used nuclear fuel characteristics with an articial neural network and a genetic algorithm. The used nuclear fuels (produ ...

SPRINGER LONDON LTD2021

Investigation on the effect of eccentricity for fuel disc irradiation tests

Andreas Pautz, Carlo Fiorina, Alessandro Scolaro

A varying degree of eccentricity always exists in the initial configuration of a nuclear fuel rod. Its impact on traditional LWR fuel is limited as the radial gap closes relatively early during irradiation. However, the effect of misalignment is expected t ...

2021

Development of a Novel Finite Volume Methodology for Multi-Dimensional Fuel Performance Applications

Alessandro Scolaro

Fuel performance codes are an essential tool for ensuring the safe and economic opera-tion of nuclear reactors. Traditionally, these codes have been developed following a simple 1.5-D modelling approach, where the fuel behavior is simplified by assuming ax ...

EPFL2021

Growth and viability of microorganisms in bentonite and their potential activity in deep geological repository environments

Niels Burzan

Radioactive waste is among the most dangerous anthropogenic waste and its safe disposal is a challenging multi-generational task. Many nations have sought for the peaceful application of nuclear fission for the reliable production of electric energy to pow ...

EPFL2021

Development and verification of pin-by-pin homogenized simplified transport solver Tortin for PWR core analysis

Andreas Pautz, Petra Mala

Currently, the pin-by-pin homogenized solvers are a very active research field as they can, unlike the nodal codes, directly predict the local power, while requiring significantly less computational resources than the heterogeneous transport codes. This pa ...

2020

Loading optimization for Swiss used nuclear fuel assemblies into final disposal canisters

Andreas Pautz, Hakim Ferroukhi, Dimitri Rochman, Alexander Vasiliev

In this study, an optimization of the canister loading for used nuclear fuels is performed, solely based on their decay heat values. By taking into account the individual irradiation history for each fuel assembly, as well as with a number of assumptions o ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2020

Applying SHARK-X to perform data assimilation with the LWR-PROTEUS Phase II integral experiments

Andreas Pautz, Daniel Jerôme Siefman, Mathieu Hursin

Data assimilation methods have recently been implemented in the sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification tool SHARK-X. This paper presents how they were used with sensitivity coefficients and randomly-sampled nuclear data to simulate integral pa ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2020

Nuclear data uncertainties for Swiss BWR spent nuclear fuel characteristics

Mathieu Hursin, Hakim Ferroukhi, Dimitri Rochman, Abdelhamid Dokhane, Alexander Vasiliev

The effect of nuclear data (fission yields, cross sections and emitted spectra) is quantified for spent nuclear fuel assemblies from a realistic boiling water reactor operated over 25 cycles. Nominal calculations are performed with the CASMO5, SIMULATE-3 a ...

2020

Development and verification of a methodology for neutron noise response to fuel assembly vibrations

Andreas Pautz, Gaëtan Girardin, Hakim Ferroukhi, Abdelhamid Dokhane, Dionysios Chionis

Nuclear reactors are stochastic systems, in which several parameters fluctuate even during steady-state conditions. In addition, structural components like fuel assemblies, vibrate due to strong hydraulic forces. This stochasticity is the cause of the neut ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2020