Coupled Neutronics, Thermal Hydraulics, and Fuel Performance Simulations of a Natural Circulation Based SMR

Funding

This research made use of the resources of the Nuclear Computational Resource Center at Idaho National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the US Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517. As part of the work supported by a Gateway for Accelerated Innovation (GAIN) in Nuclear FY 2020 voucher from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy, Holtec International subsidiary SMR LLC (hereinafter referred to as Holtec) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory entered into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) to develop coupled multiphysics core models of the Holtec–developed small modular reactor (SMR), SMR-160. The project goals were to perform a code-to-code comparison using the VERA code suite and Holtec’s licensing basis codes and methods to provide Holtec with confirmatory calculations for transient core scenarios, identify and resolve areas of discrepancy between the two models and develop a workflow so that the VERA model could be adapted easily to future changes in the design of the SMR-160 core. A prior publication focused on steady-state and cycle depletion calculations and comparisons [1]. This paper presents results of transient calculations with a focus on the thermomechanical behavior of fuel rods during transient scenarios. Due to concerns of proprietary data, no reactor design information is presented and results are presented qualitatively on normalized scales.