LOCAL BURNUP CHARACTERISTICS OF PWR SPENT NUCLEAR FUELS DISCHARGED FROM YEONGGWANG-2 NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

Spent UO2 nuclear fuel discharged from a nuclear power plant (NPP) contains fission products. U, Pu, and other actinides. Due to neutron capture by U-238 in the rim region and a temperature gradient between the center and the rim of a fuel pellet, a considerable increase in the concentration of fission products, Pu, and other actinides are expected in the pellet periphery of high burnup fuel. The characterization of the radial profiles of the various isotopic concentrations is our main concern. For all analysis, spent nuclear fuels originating from the Yeonggwang-2 pressurized water reactor (PWR) were chosen as the test specimens. In this work, the distributions of some actinide isotopes were measured from center to rim of the spent fuel specimens by a radiation shielded laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS) system. Sampling was performed along the diameter of the specimen by reducing the sampling intervals from 500 mu m in the center to 100 mu m in the pellet periphery region. It was observed that the isotopic concentration ratios for minor actinides in the center of the specimen remain almost constant and increase near the pellet periphery due to the rim effect apart from the U-236 to U-235 ratio, which remains approximately constant. In addition, the distributions of local burnup were derived from the measured isotope ratios by applying the relationship between burnup and isotopic ratio for plutonium and minor actinides calculated by the ORIGEN2 code.