Abstract
This paper reviews the state-of-the-art engineering approach for using thermal hydraulic (TH) and neutronics modeling and simulation (M&S) tools to perform rapid screening studies of novel nuclear fuel concepts within the context of accelerated fuel qualification. Global research efforts have introduced nuclear fuel and material concepts that mark a significant departure from traditional reactor materials. The number of new technologies being considered for development for light water reactors and advanced reactor types has created the need for an accelerated fuel qualification procedure. A key component of this procedure is the rapid identification of the most promising fuel concepts using computational screening studies. Advanced TH and neutronic M&S tools should be leveraged to efficiently determine whether the reactor performance and safety characteristics of a given concept warrant additional studies or whether the concept requires modification or elimination. This paper reviews best practices for performing these TH and neutronics screening studies at various stages during a fuel concept's progression through the qualification procedure. The motivation behind standardizing this approach is to minimize time and resources spent on qualification activities for fuel concepts that could be quickly refined or eliminated from consideration based on their reactor physics and TH characteristics. Adoption of this screening procedure—which focuses primarily on nuclear fuels but may be applicable to other reactor materials—will also help accelerate new material qualification by generating boundary conditions crucial to fuel performance evaluations and highlighting needed areas of separate effects experimentation. This article reviews the motivation behind the introduction of novel nuclear fuel concepts, provides incentive for utilizing TH- and neutronics-based screening studies, describes the screening approach and methodology, and includes discussion on how to interpret screening results to provide recommendations for the continued development of a given concept.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 104737 |
| Journal | Progress in Nuclear Energy |
| Volume | 162 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2023 |
Funding
This work was funded by the United States Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) Advanced Fuels Campaign. The authors would like to thank Joel McDuffee (ORNL) for his technical input on transient analysis. We also graciously acknowledge the in-depth technical reviews from Nathan Capps and Aaron Graham (both ORNL). Each of their comments significantly increased the quality of this paper. This manuscript has been co-authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DEAC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). As computational capabilities continue to improve, methods for internally coupling fuel performance, structural mechanics, and chemistry codes with TH and neutronics codes will likely be a primary research focus area, as will associated validation and uncertainty quantification analysis (Avramova et al., 2021). The VERA and MOOSE frameworks both have modules for coupling these other physical phenomena to reactor physics and TH simulations that are under ongoing development. VERA has been coupled with BISON and CTFFuel, both of which are fuel performance codes that can also predict pellet-cladding gap closure and PCMI-induced stress (Stimpson et al., 2018; Toptan et al., 2019). The thermochemical library Thermochimica has also been coupled with VERA for MSR applications to predict chemical species transport (Graham et al., 2021; Taylor et al., 2022) and may support corrosion predictions in the future (Poschmann et al., 2021). The MAMBA module in VERA can be used to predict corrosion build-up in LWRs and the associated effects on the relative power profile. Similar capabilities are under development for the MOOSE framework as part of the Yellowjacket module (Bajpai, 2022). There are many other examples of multiphysics capabilities that are specific to reactor or fuel types, such as the GERMINAL code used for SFRs (Lainet et al., 2019), that each have their own developmental needs. Validation, uncertainty quantification, and error mitigation will be a primary focus area in parallel to capability development for these multiphysics codes.This work was funded by the United States Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) Advanced Fuels Campaign. The authors would like to thank Joel McDuffee (ORNL) for his technical input on transient analysis. We also graciously acknowledge the in-depth technical reviews from Nathan Capps and Aaron Graham (both ORNL). Each of their comments significantly increased the quality of this paper.
Keywords
- Accelerated fuel qualification
- Multiphysics
- Nuclear fuels
- Reactor physics