Development of a core management tool for MYRRHA: Work in Progress

Currently, the advanced nuclear irradiation facility MYRRHA is under development at the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK•CEN in Mol, Belgium. MYRRHA is intended as a multi-purpose machine for material and fuel irradiations, radioisotopes production, silicon doping, transmutation research, education, etc. A special effort is being made within the project to develop an in-core fuel management tool for MYRRHA. Various requirements have been imposed on the core management tool; e.g., the tool should allow a user to specify a variety of optimization objectives and constraints. Based on that, a modular design of the tool was developed that makes it independent of the particular metaheuristic method used for the optimization as well as of the reactor analysis code used for an evaluation of candidate solutions during the search. In the paper, the current version of the core management tool for MYRRHA is presented together with some results on an illustrative in-core fuel management optimization problem.