A method is developed to determine the optimum fuel and power distributions for a pressurized water reactor (PWR) burnup cycle. The backward diffusion calculation and the corewise Green’s function method are used for the core model, which provides analytic derivatives for solving the nonlinear optimization problem using successive linear programming methods. The solution algorithm consists of a reverse depletion strategy that begins at the end of cycle and solves simultaneously for the optimal fuel and burnable absorber distributions while the core is depleted to the beginning of cycle. The resulting optimal solutions minimize the required fissile fuel inventory and burnable absorber loading for a PWR.