Note on the performance of parametrization strategies to determine the decay heat of PWR fuel

The behavior of fuel assembly safety properties such as decay heat is often parametrized by a set of proxy variables such as burnup and by categorical variables like UOX or MOX. The standards ANS5.1 and DIN-25463 are examples of this strategy. They face the challenge to accurately approximate a wide range of possible fuel assembly states which occur in practice because they traditionally do not follow the nuclide vector evolution with a detailed microscopic model. While burnup is widely regarded as an important fuel parameter it is only an approximation or proxy for the physical relevant quantity which is the fuel nuclide vector. The performance of one of the latest and most advanced decay heat standards, DIN-25463-2014, is compared with Studsvik’s best-estimate code SSP SNF which uses a state-of-the-art microscopic model. Both the differences in initial nuclide vector after irradiation and the differences in decay heat between 1 s and 60 years are analyzed. Comparisons with realistic PWR core fuel inventories show that the margin between SSP SNF and DIN-25463-2014 varies in a range ±5% which is a manifestation of the challenge to accurately approximate the fuel state without detailed microscopic model. Given today’s small compute footprint of best-estimate codes for decay heat determination we conclude that parametrization strategies have little advantage except for applications like system codes used in transient analyses.