Abstract
The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has developed the TVA Watts Bar Unit 1 Multi-Physics Benchmark problem to encourage V&V of traditional and novel high-fidelity reactor simulation tools from participants around the world. The benchmark includes publicly available measurements for an operating commercial nuclear power reactor, along with detailed reactor and fuel specifications. The original source of the benchmark problems was developed by CASL for the development and testing of capabilities in VERA. VERA employs advanced pin-wise 3D 51-group deterministic neutronics directly coupled to a 3D subchannel thermal-hydraulics code and a mature isotopics depletion and decay code. Though its methods have many advantages for integral simulation of reactor operation, and have been shown to be very accurate, its neutronics method requires approximations that may not be ideal for some applications. In this work the continuous-energy Monte Carlo transport codes Shift and OpenMC are used to generate high-fidelity solutions for the Watts Bar 1 benchmark problem. These methods are the gold-standard for neutronics calculations but can be difficult to use for large reactor problems and lack some needed capability. However, these limitations are overcome by software automation and leveraging capabilities and results from VERA.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management, ANFM 2025 |
| Publisher | American Nuclear Society |
| Pages | 812-821 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780894482267 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2025 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | 2025 Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management, ANFM 2025 - Clearwater Beach, United States Duration: Jul 20 2025 → Jul 23 2025 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management, ANFM 2025 |
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Conference
| Conference | 2025 Advances in Nuclear Fuel Management, ANFM 2025 |
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| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Clearwater Beach |
| Period | 07/20/25 → 07/23/25 |
Funding
This research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program, award number DE-FOA-0002783. The authors would also acknowledge the Shift development team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the OpenMC development team, particularly Paul Romano at Argonne National Laboratory. This research leveraged existing VERA models and computational resources provided by the VERA Users Group which has been supported by a variety of commercial organizations over the years, particularly Westinghouse and TVA for the public release of the Watts Bar 1 data. This research utilized the high-performance computing resources at Idaho National Laboratory [22], which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517.
Keywords
- Monte Carlo
- OpenMC
- Shift
- VERA
- Watts Bar