FACILITY SIMULATION OF THE DUPle FUEL FABRICATION PROCESS

The DUPIC (direct use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU reactors) process, which will reconstitute spent pressurized-water reactor (PWR) fuel into fuel for Canadian deuterium-uranium (CANDU) reactors, is being developed by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). Through an agreement between the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology and the US Department of Energy, KAERI and Los Alamos National Laboratory are cooperating in safeguards planning and development for DUPIC. As one part of this safeguards development, we have used the Los Alamos program FacSim to simulate the operation of the DUPIC Fuel Development Facility (DFDF), a laboratory-scale implementation of the DUPIC process. The simulation results give detailed information about the amounts and locations of materials in DFDF as a function of time, and also provide estimates of the expected scrap and waste generation. This information is being used for both process and safeguards design purposes. We describe below some of the simulation results and discuss plans for additional studies ofDFDF and the DUPIC pilot scale facility.