Abstract
This work describes the ongoing coupling work establishing ORIGEN as a physics module for depletion, activation, and decay in the MOOSE/BISON fuel performance code. The current phase has focused on the implementation of an activation model, mainly intended for evaluation and comparison of accident tolerant cladding designs within a single fuel performance framework. The next phase will develop a capability for fuel depletion. New aspects of this work include: investigation of how to allow the high-fidelity ORIGEN capability to be interoperable extension of existing lower-fidelity cladding models (e.g. based only on fast fluence), introduction of recalculation thresholds to reduce computational cost during multi-physics iterations, and runtime experiments to assess the cost of this additional physics relative to the baseline MOOSE/BISON fuel performance calculations. The current results show activation increases runtime by a factor of approximately 7, but additional optimizations, discussed in the conclusions, are possible.
