VERA BENCHMARKING RESULTS FOR KRSKO NUCLEAR POWER PLANT CYCLE 1

摘要

The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), the first US Department of Energy (DOE) Innovation Hub, has developed a high-fidelity suite of methods and software for engineering analyses of commercial nuclear power plants. The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) has been successfully developed and applied to several reactor types operated or designed by CASL partners. To broaden its validation basis, VERA was applied to the Nuklearna elektrarna Krsko, a European two-loop Westing-house-designed pressurized water reactor (PWR) with 16×16 fuel. VERA enables multigroup deterministic and continuous-energy Monte Carlo neutron transport for the entire reactor using the same basic input and output features. Deterministic methods are directly coupled to a two-phase subchannel thermal-hydraulic method and an in-line isotopic decay and depletion module for 3D whole-core power distribution and fuel depletion analyses. VERA's performance for full core calculations is documented, and the results are compared to measured critical boron concentrations, startup physics tests results, and measured radial power distributions from Krsko Cycle 1. Results are also compared to calculations from the Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI) CORD-2 package routinely used for verification of the Krsko reload cores. Finally, comparisons are made for a set of 2D lattice depletions performed by Serpent and Polaris for additional verification.