FCCI : Fuel Cycle Confidence Improvment
This project is dedicated to build and coordinate an effort for increasing the fuel cycle simulators confidence.
Dynamic fuel cycle simulation code is promising tool for assessing future options for nuclear energy. Ideally, it should be able to provide answers to a wide panel of questions, that could be for instance:
- Estimate the natural uranium resources consumption regarding different reactor technologies or options,
- Identify the radioprotection issues during spent fuel transportation
- Estimate the sizing for ultimate waste storage or disposal.
Different institutions aim to develop their own numerical tools regarding their scientific objective. Available tools may have several different philosophy and cannot then answer all the relevant issues of future nuclear fuel cycle.
Also, fuel cycle simulations are affected by a lot of uncertainties :
- Their role in the scientific, industrial and political decision related to the futur of nuclear energy is not really known.
- Fuel cycle simulations cannot be validated on non existing reactor fleet.
- Basic data used for building models (economic as facilities models) are affected by uncertainties that propagates in the fuel cycle simulation output.
- A wide of input variable and parameters are possible, impacting strongly the result of a scenario simulation.
Points 1. to 3. are already investigated by fuel cycle developpers in other researches framework. Providing ansmwers to the point 4 is the goal of the initiated approach. Sensitivity Analysis (SA) formalism could help understanding and improving the weight of input variables and parameters in an output standard deviation.