OPAL REACTOR CALCULATIONS USING REACTOR PHYSICS CODE SERPENT

摘要

Monte Carlo codes are routinely employed in criticality calculations due to the high-fidelity capability to represent real world scenarios, requiring far fewer approximations. Serpent, developed at VTT, Finland, is a powerful new code that allows a user to determine the reactivity of a critical system, neutron fluxes and reaction rates, point-kinetic parameters and generate group cross sections as well as burnup. In this paper, the capability of Serpent is investigated by utilising data from the Open Pool Australian Light-water (OPAL) Reactor, Sydney, Australia, a modern 20MW(th) open-pool research reactor. This work includes simulating 76 experimentally critical configurations, determining the integral control rod worth of the 5 control elements, determining point-kinetic parameters and thermal neutron fluxes and simulating burnup of six fuel cycles following an initial fresh loading of the core. Most of the simulation results are in excellent agreement with experimental data and other results in the literature. Some discrepancies are seen in the thermal neutron flux calculations and burnup reactivity which are also observed in the literature. While these issues warrant further investigation, Serpent provides results in generally good agreement with the available experimental data and appears to be a good candidate code for future reactor physics work.