On the neutronics of European lead-cooled fast reactor

The perspective of nuclear energy development in the near future imposes a new challenge on a number of sciences over the world. For years, the European Commission (EC) has sponsored scientific activities through the framework programmes (FP). The lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR) development in the European Union (EU) has been carried out within European lead-cooled system (ELSY) project of the 6th FP of EURATOM. This paper concerns the reactor core neutronic and burn-up design studies. We discuss two different core configurations of ELSY reactor; one loaded with the reference – mixed oxide fuel (MOX), whereas the second one with an advanced fuel – uranium- -plutonium nitride. Both fuels consist of reactor grade plutonium, depleted uranium and additionally, a fraction of minor actinides (MA). The fuel burn-up and the time evolution of the reactor characteristics has been assessed using a Monte Carlo burn-up code (MCB). One of the important findings concerns the importance of power profile evolution with burn-up as a limiting factor of the refuelling interval.