Research of fuel depletion aims at development and introduction of advanced types of burnable absorbers (BA) in nuclear fuel. BAs compensate for the initial reactivity excess and consequently allow for lower power peaking factors and longer fuel cycles with higher fuel enrichments.

The paper describes the comparison of selected BA elements (Gd, Eu, Er) for 3 different nuclear fuel types (VVER, PWR and SFR). The effect of harder VVER spectra and the effect of thermal vs fast neutron spectra is evaluated and commented. Uniformly distributed BAs in the fuel were assumed.

Comparison calculations were performed with the newly developed UWB1 fast fuel depletion code and with the SERPENT Monte Carlo code. The comparison of UWB1 and SERPENT codes is included in the analysis. Next steps of improving the UWB1 code are suggested.

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