Abstract
Recently, the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) capabilities have been extended for the modeling and simulation of boiling water reactors (BWRs). VERA was developed under the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light-Water Reactors (CASL) program, a US Department of Energy Energy Innovation Hub from 2010 to 2020. VERA was determined to be the optimal tool to calculate sub-pin isotopic concentrations for characterization of the high-burnup BWR fuel. This paper discusses the application of VERA to calculate sub-pin noble gas isotope ratios and compares them to experimental measurements made along the radial dimension of a high-burnup fuel pellet. The fuel was irradiated >60 GWd/t during several early cycles of Quad Cities Unit 1. Then, the sub-pin noble gas isotope concentrations of an assembly model of an 8 ×8 BWR assembly and a quarter-core equilibrium cycle model, both simulating the high-burnup fuel of interest, are compared. Results from both models show that radial trends are well-predicted with some exceptions near the pellet edge.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2024 |
| Publisher | American Nuclear Society |
| Pages | 399-408 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780894487972 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2024 |
| Event | 2024 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2024 - San Francisco, United States Duration: Apr 21 2024 → Apr 24 2024 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2024 |
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Conference
| Conference | 2024 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2024 |
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| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | San Francisco |
| Period | 04/21/24 → 04/24/24 |
Funding
This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 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). This work was supported by the National Nuclear Security Agency Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development. Work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
Keywords
- BWR
- VERA
- assembly vs. core
- isotopics
- validation