Boiling Water Reactor Fuel Assembly Axial Design Optimization Using Tabu Search

In this paper the implementation of the tabu search (TS) optimization method to a boiling water reactor's (BWR's) fuel assembly (FA) axial design is described. The objective of this implementation is to test the TS method for the search of optimal FA axial designs. This implementation has been linked to the reactor core simulator CM-PRESTO in order to evaluate each design proposed in a reactor cycle operation. The evaluation of the proposed fuel designs takes into account the most important safety limits included in a BWR in-core analysis based on the Haling principle. Results obtained show that TS is a promising method for solving the axial design problem. However, it merits further study in order to find better adaptation of the TS method for the specific problem.