Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) has started a conceptual design study of a small-sized High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) with 50 MW thermal power (HTR50S) to be deployed in developing countries in the 2020s. The nuclear design of the HTR50S is performed by upgrading that of a High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR), which is the Japanese HTGR with 30 MW thermal power. In the HTTR design, 12 kinds of fuel enrichment were used to optimize the power distribution. In the previous study of the HTR50S, we succeeded in reducing the number of the fuel enrichment to 3. The present study challenges the nuclear design for effective use of uranium by utilizing high burn-up fuel and axial fuel shuffling, in which a half of the loaded fuel elements is discharged from the core every 2 years and the remains are reloaded. The core burn-up calculations were performed and the nuclear characteristics were confirmed to satisfy the design requirement. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.