A macro reactivity-equivalent physical transformation method for prismatic gas-cooled reactors utilizing uranium oxycarbide fuel

Prismatic block nuclear reactor geometric homogenization is of interest in order to decrease the expense of full core calculations. The reactivity-equivalent physical transformation (RPT) method of homogenizing TRISO particle fuel regions has been proven for the rods of prismatic gas reactors as well as the pebbles of pebble bed reactor cores. After application of the RPT method, each fuel block of a prismatic gas reactor contains more than 900 different regions to explicitly model. A full core simulation of a problem of this size would simply be too computationally expensive to perform regularly. In order to perform needed calculations for these reactors, simplification of the models is a must. One option is to use a simple volume-weighted homogenization (VWH), which results in a highly underestimated reactivity for the fuel block. The goal of this research is explore methods of homogenization that will correctly predict key parameters of the problem while providing a significant decrease in the computational expense. This paper outlines a macro reactivity-equivalent transformation (MRPT) method applied to prismatic gas reactor fuel blocks that greatly decreases the expense of the calculation while maintaining accuracy of the key parameters of the problem.