ATR PDQ and MCWO Fuel Burnup Analysis Codes Evaluation

The Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is being studied to determine the feasibility of converting it from the highly enriched Uranium (HEU) fuel that is currently uses to low enriched Uranium (LEU) fuel. In order to achieve this goal, it would be best to qualify some different computational methods than those that have been used at ATR for the past 40 years. This paper discusses two methods of calculating the burnup of ATR fuel elements. The existing method, that uses the PDQ code, is compared to a modern method that uses A General Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport Code (MCNP) combined with the Origen2.2 code. This modern method, MCNP with ORIGEN2.2 (MCWO), is found to give excellent agreement with the existing method (PDQ). Both of MCWO and PDQ are also in a very good agreement to the 235U burnup data generated by an analytical method