BlueCRAB and MELCOR Microreactor Code-to-Code Comparison with FATE

Alex Huning, Manit Shah, James Scobel, Yan Yizhou, Sung Jin Lee, Ryan Som

Research output: Book/ReportCommissioned report

Abstract

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in addition to many advanced reactor design vendors, is expected to employ the Comprehensive Reactor Analysis Bundle (CRAB) suite of tools along with the MELCOR code to perform safety assessments and quantify postulated releases from microreactors. These tools were initially investigated in FY 2023 under the US Department of Energy’s Microreactor Program for gaps and as a potential demonstration or example cases to better support their development and provide insights to the industry. This work continued in FY 2024 with guidance from Westinghouse Electric Company on developing an example case—a realistic heat pipe microreactor (rHPMR)—to support similar reactor concepts that may use both BlueCRAB and MELCOR for their design and licensing activities. The goal was then to perform a code-to-code comparison with their FATE (Facility Flow, Aerosol, Thermal, and Explosion) code using this rHPMR example case. However, MELCOR limitations were identified during this fiscal year, which precluded the solution of this specific example case with few alternatives for an effective solution. A similar rHPMR MELCOR model was developed but without explicit heat pipe models. Future efforts may revisit this example with revised models that include realistic fuel, core, and heat pipe models. In this report, detailed neutronic results and steady-state MELCOR results are presented. Although many code and numerical analysis options exist for neutronics, thermal hydraulics, and other principal design disciplines, limited options exist for mechanistic source term calculations. Therefore, studies such as the one presented here should aid in starting the development of valuable safety analysis confirmatory models for microreactors.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationUnited States
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

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