CORE DESIGN, FUEL MANAGEMENT AND COST CALCULATIONS

This chapter discusses core design, fuel management, and cost calculations. The objective of the core designer is to obtain, with the minimum costs, a reliable and safe reactor capable of satisfying given requirements. The core designer has to find the solution of minimum cost under the given constraints. Such a process is called optimization. The possible choices are represented by a certain number of independent parameters that can be varied by the designer; their choice can be rather arbitrary, at the limit only the total reactor power and its load-following performances being fixed from the beginning. The term fuel management is used to describe the strategies according to which the fuel is loaded, unloaded, or reshuffled in the reactor. Sometimes this term is also used to describe what happens to the fuel outside the reactor. Various types of fuel-management schemes are used or are under study for high-temperature reactors. The aim of all optimizations is to minimize the cost of the energy produced by the plant. This cost includes investment cost, fuel costs, operating expenses, and taxes.