Modelica Based Economic Analysis of Nuclear Fuel Cycle

Abstract The nuclear fuel cycle with spent fuel reprocessing process is called closed cycle. The reprocessing process of the fuel cycle recovers the fission elements uranium, plutonium and their isotopes. The cost of the nuclear fuel cycle includes front-end and back-end. The front-end segments mainly include mining, conversion, concentration, fuel element fabrication, etc. The back-end cost includes storage, processing, disposal and so on. Modelica language is a physical process description language based on objects and equations. Modelica language can be used to realize the visual modeling of various causal or non-causal processes. The main content of this research is to model different nuclear fuel cycles, including summarizing the simplified model of closed fuel cycle system, economic considerations and system working principle, the current economic analysis and research status of closed fuel cycle, combing the existing models, the use and application of OpenModelica language, especially the visual modeling method of OpenModelica, to achieve economic analysis of different nuclear fuel cycles.