STARBUCS

STARBUCS (Standardized Analysis of Reactivity for Burnup Credit using SCALE) is a sequence to perform criticality calculations for spent fuel systems employing burnup credit. STARBUCS automates the criticality analysis of spent fuel configurations by coupling the depletion and criticality aspects of the analysis, thereby eliminating the need to manually process the spent fuel nuclide compositions into a format compatible with criticality safety codes. STARBUCS performs a depletion analysis calculation for each spatially-varying (axial and/or radial) burnup region of a spent fuel assembly using the ORIGEN-ARP sequence of SCALE. Options are provided to adjust the predicted inventories to account for know isotopic bias and uncertainty. The spent fuel compositions for user-selected isotopes are then used to generate resonance self-shielded cross sections for each burnup-dependent fuel region using the SCALE CSAS control module. Finally, a KENO V.a or KENO-VI 3-D criticality calculation for the system is performed.