Technical note An evaluation of the Americium insertion in Uo 2 fuel Antonella Lombardi Costa, Claubia Pereira* Departamento de Eng. Nuclear- UFMG, Av. do Contorno, 842/9  andar, Centro, 30110-060, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil Received 10 May 2001; accepted 4 June 2001 Abstract The idea is to evaluate the neutronic performance of a core of UO 2 fuel with the Americium insertion in a standard PWR core. The homogeneous mode is used and changes in the mod- erator to fuel volume ratio (V m /V f ) are evaluated. For the simulation the WIMS-D5 code was utilised. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Many ideas are being studied in order to burn up the high radioactivity wastes. Several countries are developing different programs, including the insertion of minor actinides (MAs) in PWR reactors (Kimura et al., 1994; Mori et al., 1997a,b; Puill and Bergeron, 1997; Takeda et al., 1998; Kingdon et al.,1999, Charlton et al., 1999, Nikitin et al., 1999), Molten salt reactors (Kasma and Hirakawa, 1993; Alekssev et. al., 1997; Hron, 1999), or yet using other ways as catalizators and accelerators (Bowman et al, 1992; Tuyle et al., 1993; Rubbia, 1995; Takahashi, 1995; Segev et al., 1996; Segev and Galperin, 1997; Baxter, 1999) in order to burn them up. Consider- ing the first idea, the MAs are inserted in some point of the fuel cycle for transmu- tation or incineration during the operation. This work studies the viability of burnup and transmutation of Americium in the core of a PWR (pressurized water reactors), when it is inserted in the UO 2 fuel. It considers homogeneous insertions Annals of Nuclear Energy 29 (2002) 767–775 www.elsevier.com/locate/anucene 0306-4549/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0306-4549(01)00072-X * Corresponding author. Tel.: +55-31-32381007; fax: +55-31-32381760. E-mail address: claubia@nuclear.ufmg.br (C. Pereira).