Effect of heterogeneity in plutonium recycling in steady state PWR

International audience; The possible delay of decades for the deployment of fourth generation reactors brings upnew issues. Countries like France which are storing Plutonium for years in prediction ofstarting FBR could have to adapt their plutonium management strategy.We have compared different strategies for plutonium recycling in PWR reactors. We havechosen to limit the scope of this study to PWRs considering the standard uranium cycle,and we investigated the influence of the heterogeneity in the assembly that would containthe recycled plutonium. The comparison of different strategies is made at steady-state.This paper present a specific method developed to allow complete and detailed studiesof equilibrium scenarios and how it has been implemented and integrated inside the opensourceMURE package.We will then discuss of the results obtained through this method apply to PWRs loadedwith homogeneous and heterogeneous assemblies using the following criteria: resourceconsumption, Pu inventories in the cycle and waste production