| Summary: | In a nuclear power plant, control rods play a central role to control the reactivity ofthe core. In an inspection campaign of three control rods (CR 99) operated in theKKL reactor in Leibstadt, Switzerland, during 6 respectively 7 consecutive cycles,defects were detected in the top part of the control rods due to swelling caused bydepletion of the neutron-absorbing 10B isotope (Boron-10). In order to correlatethese defects to control rod depletion, the 10B depletion has in this study beencalculated in detail for the absorber pins in the top node of the control rods.Today the core simulator PLOCA7 is used for predicting the behavior of the reactorcore, where the retrievable information from the standard control rod follow-up isthe average 10B depletion for clusters of 19 absorber holes i.e. one axial node.However, the local 10B depletion in an absorber pin may be significantly differentfrom the node average depletion that is re-ceived from POLCA7. To learn more, the 10B depletion has been simulated for each absorber hole in the uppermost node usingthe stochastic Monte Carlo 3D simulation code MCNP as well as an MCNP- based2D-depletion code (McScram). It was found that the 10B depletion is significantly higher for the uppermost absorberpins than the node average. Furthermore, the radial depletion in individual absorberpins was found to be much higher than expected. The results are consistent with theexperimental data on control rod defects.
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