Specification of Advanced Safety Modeling Requirements (Rev.0). Global Nuclear Energy Partnership

摘要

The U.S. Department of Energy's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership has lead to renewed interest in liquid-metal-cooled fast reactors for the purpose of closing the nuclear fuel cycle and making more efficient use of future repository capacity. However, the U.S. has not designed or constructed a fast reactor in nearly 30 years. Accurate, high-fidelity, whole-plant dynamics safety simulations will play a crucial role by providing confidence that component and system designs will satisfy established design limits and safety margins under a wide variety of operational, design basis, and beyond design basis transient conditions. Current modeling capabilities for fast reactor safety analyses have resulted from several hundred person-years of code development effort supported by experimental validation. The broad spectrum of mechanistic and phenomenological models that have been developed represent an enormous amount of institutional knowledge that needs to be maintained. Complicating this, the existing code architectures for safety modeling evolved from programming practices of the 1970s. This has lead to monolithic applications with interdependent data models which require significant knowledge of the complexities of the entire code in order for each component to be maintained. In order to develop an advanced fast reactor safety modeling capability, the limitations of the existing code architecture must be overcome while preserving the capabilities that already exist.