An Open-Source Coupling for Depletion During Fuel Cycle Modeling

Fuel depletion is an important aspect of fuel cycle modeling, allowing a user to account for how loaded fuel compositions affect in-core and spent fuel compositions and their related fuel cycle metrics. Therefore, multiple methods have been developed to account for depletion within fuel cycle simulations. This work adds to that list of methods by introducing an open-source coupling between Cyclus and OpenMC to perform fuel depletion during a fuel cycle simulation, called OpenMCyclus. This work explains the methodology of OpenMCyclus and presents a benchmark comparison between the performance of OpenMCyclus and another Cyclus archetype that uses recipes to define spent fuel compositions. The development of this coupling expands the functionalities possible through Cyclus by providing real-time fuel depletion that is reactor agnostic and open source.