Abstract
Energy release from the decay of radionuclides in nuclear fuel after its discharge from reactor is a critical parameter for design, safety, and licensing analyses of used nuclear fuel storage, transportation, and repository systems. Well-validated computational tools and nuclear data are essential for decay heat prediction. This paper summarizes the validation of the SCALE nuclear analysis code system version 6.2.4, used with ENDF/B-VII.1 libraries, for decay heat analysis of light water reactor used fuel. The experimental data used for validation include full-assembly decay heat measurements that cover assembly burnups of 5 to 51 GWd/tonne U, cooling times after discharge in the 2- to 27-year range, and initial fuel enrichments up to 4 wt% 235U. The comparison between calculated (C) and experimental (E) decay heat showed very good agreement, with an average C/E over all considered measurements of 1.006 (σ = 0.016) for pressurized water reactor and 0.984 (σ = 0.077) for boiling water reactor assembly measurements. The effect of using assembly-average versus axially varying modeling data on the calculated decay heat, important to thermal analyses for used fuel transportation and storage systems, is discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 403-413 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Nuclear Technology |
| Volume | 208 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Funding
This work was funded by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The authors would like to thank Don Algama of the NRC Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research and Will Wieselquist of Oak Ridge National Laboratory for continued support and valuable feedback. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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). This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 ). This work was funded by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The authors would like to thank Don Algama of the NRC Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research and Will Wieselquist of Oak Ridge National Laboratory for continued support and valuable feedback.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| DOE Public Access Plan | |
| U.S. Government | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission | |
| National Research Council | |
| National Research Council Canada | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
Keywords
- Decay heat
- ORIGEN
- SCALE
- light water reactor
- validation
