| No. | Year | Title | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 2016 | The application of UWB1 nuclear fuel depletion code on a CANDU fuel bundleM. Lovecký, R. Škoda, M. S. Hussein, J. J. Song, P. K. ChanBenchmarked the University of West Bohemia's fast depletion code UWB1 on the 37-element CANDU bundle against WIMS-AECL, Serpent and MCNP6, so burnable-absorber studies can run in seconds per depletion step instead of hours. | Prog. Nucl. EnergyJournal |
| 02 | 2015 | Burnable Absorbers in CANDU Fuel Bundle Depletion with UWB1 CodeM. Lovecký, R. Škoda, M. S. Hussein, J. Song, P. K. ChanShowed UWB1 is suitable for studying burnable absorbers that remove the initial reactivity transient and suppress the plutonium peak in CANDU fuel, with a large saving in depletion calculation time. | ICMSNSE 2015Conference · Ottawa |
§ Research Fuel depletion and burnable absorbers
Screening CANDU fuel changes in seconds, not hours.
With the University of West Bohemia's UWB1 team, he was part of the team that benchmarked a fast depletion code on the 37-element CANDU bundle, so burnable-absorber additives can be screened quickly.
The question
As fuel burns, its composition changes. Uranium-235 is consumed, plutonium-239 is bred from uranium-238 and then burned in turn, and fission products that absorb neutrons build up. Following those changes, step by step through the life of the fuel, is a depletion calculation. In fresh CANDU fuel, the reactivity of a bundle does not simply fall with burnup: it first rises as plutonium builds up, the so-called plutonium peak, before it falls. That early transient and peak affect how the core is managed.
One way to flatten it is to add a small amount of a burnable absorber, a material that soaks up neutrons early in life and is itself used up as the fuel burns. Choosing the absorber, its amount and its placement means running many depletion calculations. With a full Monte Carlo depletion code, each can take hours.
What he did
UWB1 is a fast depletion code developed at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic; one depletion step takes about ten seconds. Working with its developers, M. Lovecký and R. Škoda, and with J. J. Song and P. K. Chan at the Royal Military College of Canada, he took part in applying UWB1 to the standard 37-element CANDU bundle and benchmarking it against WIMS, Serpent and MCNP6, which he had validated against WIMS-AECL on the full CANDU 6 core.
The 2015 conference paper showed that UWB1 is suitable for studying burnable absorbers that remove the initial reactivity transient and suppress the plutonium peak in CANDU fuel, with a large saving in calculation time. The 2016 journal paper in Progress in Nuclear Energy reported the full benchmark. It has since been cited by the UWB1 group’s own follow-up on burnable absorbers (2019), by an article in CNL Nuclear Review (2020), and by work published in Annals of Nuclear Energy in 2025.
Why it matters
A validated fast code changes what is practical: dozens of absorber candidates and loadings can be screened in the time one full Monte Carlo depletion would take, and only the promising ones need the expensive check. The same logic, a fast tool tested against slower reference codes, runs through his other work on CANDU fuels and on the Multispectrum CANDU Reactor, where depletion over thousands of days decides how much weapons material a core can destroy.
§1 Papers
The work this rests on.
§2 Related