Executive Summary

Research Objectives and Scope of Work

Increasing the power in existing and future Boiling Water Reactors will be beneficial for their economic performance.  The overall objective of this research is to assess the feasibility of increasing the core power by increasing the power density of existing and future BWR, while maintaining the same accepted safety margins for today's BWRs.  In principle this may be achieved by varying the operating conditions, assembly geometry, fuel types, and/or fuel-pin designs.  While some progress has been achieved over the years towards increasing the power density of BWRs, it has mainly come by three approaches:  reducing the uncertainty about operating conditions, reducing the peak pin and assembly power factors and using a smaller diameter pins in the assemblies.  This project will focus on what can be achieved through innovative geometry and/ or materials of the fuel pins at fixed operating pressure, core inlet temperature, core exit enthalpy, and power distribution.  Independently, the impact of these operating conditions will be explored.  The reference BWR for this work was tasked to be a BWR6 reactor....