Status of Reactor Physics Activities on Cross Section Generation and Functionalization for the Prismatic Very High Temperture Reactor, and Development of Spatially-Heterogeneous Codes

摘要

The cross section generation methodology and procedure for design and analysis of the prismatic Very High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (VHTR) core have been addressed for the DRAGON and REBUS-3/DIF3D code suite. Approaches for tabulation and functionalization of cross sections have been investigated and implemented. The cross sections are provided at different burnup and fuel and moderator temperature states. In the tabulation approach, the multigroup cross sections are tabulated as a function of the state variables so that a cross section file is able to cover the range of core operating conditions. Cross sections for points between tabulated data points are fitted simply by linear interpolation. For the functionalization approach, an investigation of the applicability of quadratic polynomials and linear coupling for fuel and moderator temperature changes has been conducted, based on the observation that cross sections are monotonically changing with fuel or moderator temperatures. Preliminary results show that the functionalization makes it possible to cover a wide range of operating temperature conditions with only six sets of data per burnup, while maintaining a good accuracy and significantly reducing the size of the cross section file. In these approaches, the number of fission products has been minimized to a few nuclides (I/Xe/Pm/Sm and a lumped fission product) to reduce the overall computation time without sacrificing solution accuracy.