FEASIBILITY INVESTIGATION OF APPLICATION OF MPACT TO CORE DESIGN STUDIES OF NBSR-2, A HEAVY WATER-REFLECTED, HETEROGENEOUS LEU FUEL RESEARCH REACTOR

摘要

Engineers at NIST would like to use the VERA software suite developed by CASL to study a new 20 MW research reactor design called NBSR-2, which uses heterogeneous MTR-type LEU fuel plates, a light water coolant, and a heavy water reflector. These features are a significant departure from the PWR-type power reactors previously benchmarked in VERA. Comparable 2-D models of NBSR-2 were developed in both MPACT and MCNP6, and the MPACT model was benchmarked to within 120 pcm (1 pcm = 10~(-5) Ak/k) and 1.5 % mean error in fast and thermal flux distributions. This work is intended to facilitate additional design studies of NBSR-2 with VERA software in the future, and to assess the maturity of MPACT's ability to model non-PWR reactors.