Specification of advanced safety modeling requirements (Rev. 0).
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. To accomplish this, a set of advanced safety modeling requirements is defined, based on modern programming practices, that focuses on modular development within a flexible coupling framework. An approach for integrating the existing capabilities of the SAS4A/SASSYS-1 fast reactor safety analysis code into the SHARP framework is provided in order to preserve existing capabilities while providing a smooth transition to advanced modeling capabilities. In doing this, the advanced fast reactor safety models will target leadership-class computing architectures for massively-parallel high-fidelity computations while providing continued support for rapid prototyping using modest fidelity computations on multiple-core desktop platforms.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- NE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 932947
- Report Number(s):
- ANL-AFCI-229; TRN: US0803971
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- ENGLISH
Similar Records
Enhanced Performance Fast Reactors with Engineered Passive Safety Systems
SAS4A/SASSYS-1 Commercial Grade Dedication Example Report for a Generic Sodium Pool-Type Fast Reactor Application
Related Subjects
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
29 ENERGY PLANNING
POLICY AND ECONOMY
ARCHITECTURE
CAPACITY
DESIGN
FAST REACTORS
NUCLEAR ENERGY
NUCLEAR FUELS
PROGRAMMING
SAFETY
SAFETY ANALYSIS
SAFETY MARGINS
SIMULATION
SPECIFICATIONS
TARGETS
TRANSIENTS
VALIDATION