Introduction
Dynamic fuel cycle simulation code is promising tool for assessing future options for nuclear energy. Ideally, it should be able to provide answers to a wide panel of questions: for instance, such a tool should estimate the natural uranium resources consumption regarding different reactor technologies (or options), identify the radioprotection issues during spent fuel transportation or estimate the sizing of ultimate waste. Different institutions aim to develop their own numerical tools regarding their scientific objective and all the available tools cannot answer all the relevant issues of future nuclear fuel cycle.
No matter how powerful fuel cycle dynamic simulations are, they cannot be validated on non-existent reactor fleet. This issue is often coped with benchmarks or inter-code comparison. The NEA proposes, thanks to the expert group on advanced fuel cycle scenarios, a bench of scenarios that could serve as a reference for any new code developers. The different exercises proposed (TRU management scenarios, uncertainties of Input parameters on nuclear fuel cycle scenario studies, dose rate calculation for irradiated fuel assembly,…) shows the large panel of result that should provide a fuel cycle simulation. The different proposed benchmarks are quite complete (several reactors that recycle several times several nuclei) and the analysis of inter code comparison is often difficult to perform. Indeed, in a fuel cycle calculation, lots of error compensations happen leading the identification of biases very difficult if not impossible. On the other hand, exercises that would try to identify specific differences would be too dedicated to a group of simulation tools.