Assessing the effect of fuel burnup on control rod worth for HEU and LEU cores of GHARR-1

Abstract

An important parameter in the design and analysis of a nuclear reactor is the reactivity worth of the control rod which is a measure of the efficiency of the control rod to absorb excess reactivity. During reactor operation, the control rod worth is affected by factors such as the fuel burnup, Xenon concentration, Samarium concentration and the position of the control rod in the core. This study investigates the effect of fuel burnup on the control rod worth by comparing results of a fresh and an irradiated core of Ghana's Miniature Neutron Source Reactor for both HEU and LEU cores. In this study, two codes have been utilized namely BURNPRO for fuel burnup calculation and MCNP5 which uses densities of actinides of the irradiated fuel obtained from BURNPRO. Results showed a decrease of the control rod worth with burnup for the LEU while rod worth increased with burnup for the HEU core. The average thermal flux in both inner and outer irradiation sites also decreased significantly with burnup for both cores. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.