Abstract
The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors* is developing a collection of methods and software products known as VERA, the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications. One component of the testing and validation plan for VERA is comparison of neutronics results to a set of continuous energy Monte Carlo solutions for a range of pressurized water reactor geometries using the SCALE component KENO-VI developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Recent improvements in data, methods, and parallelism have enabled KENO, previously utilized predominately as a criticality safety code, to demonstrate excellent capability and performance for reactor physics applications. The highly detailed and rigorous KENO solutions provide a reliable numeric reference for VERA neutronics and also demonstrate the most accurate predictions achievable by modeling and simulations tools for comparison to operating plant data. This paper demonstrates the performance of KENO-VI for the Watts Bar Unit 1 Cycle 1 zero power physics tests, including reactor criticality, control rod worths, and isothermal temperature coefficients.
| Original language | English |
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| State | Published - 2014 |
| Event | 2014 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2014 - Kyoto, Japan Duration: Sep 28 2014 → Oct 3 2014 |
Conference
| Conference | 2014 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2014 |
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| Country/Territory | Japan |
| City | Kyoto |
| Period | 09/28/14 → 10/3/14 |
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions to this work by the CASL partners at Tennessee Valley Authority and Westinghouse for their data and expertise related to the initial startup physics tests of Watts Bar Nuclear 1. Specifically the authors thank Lukus Barns, Kevin Elam, Brian Elder, and Rose Montgomery of TVA, as well as Fausto Franceschini of Westinghouse, for their invaluable cooperation with CASL. The authors would also like to acknowledge the use of the Fission supercomputer of the High Performance Computing Facility at Idaho National Laboratory, which permitted the long computational runtimes and large data storage requirements for this analysis. This research was supported by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (www.casl.gov), an Energy Innovation Hub (www.energy.gov/hubs) for Modeling and Simulation of Nuclear Reactors under US Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. of Nuclear Reactors under US Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This research was supported by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (www.casl.gov), an Energy Innovation Hub (www.energy.gov/hubs) for Modeling and Simulation This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States 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 United States Government purposes.
Keywords
- CASL
- KENO
- MONTE CARLO
- SCALE
- VERA
- WATTS BAR