Development of a Consensus Standard for Verification and Validation of Nuclear System Thermal-Fluids Software

Journal Article · Thu Dec 01 00:00:00 EST 2011 · Nuclear Engineering and Design

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nucengdes.2011.03.056· OSTI ID:1030682

Harvego, Edwin A; Schultz, Richard R; Crane, Ryan L

With the resurgence of nuclear power and increased interest in advanced nuclear reactors as an option to supply abundant energy without the associated greenhouse gas emissions of the more conventional fossil fuel energy sources, there is a need to establish internationally recognized standards for the verification and validation (V&V) of software used to calculate the thermal-hydraulic behavior of advanced reactor designs for both normal operation and hypothetical accident conditions. To address this need, ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Standards and Certification has established the V&V 30 Committee, under the jurisdiction of the V&V Standards Committee, to develop a consensus standard for verification and validation of software used for design and analysis of advanced reactor systems. The initial focus of this committee will be on the V&V of system analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software for nuclear applications. To limit the scope of the effort, the committee will further limit its focus to software to be used in the licensing of High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors. In this framework, the Standard should conform to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other regulatory practices, procedures and methods for licensing of nuclear power plants as embodied in the United States (U.S.) Code of Federal Regulations and other pertinent documents such as Regulatory Guide 1.203, 'Transient and Accident Analysis Methods' and NUREG-0800, 'NRC Standard Review Plan'. In addition, the Standard should be consistent with applicable sections of ASME NQA-1-2008 'Quality Assurance Requirements for Nuclear Facility Applications (QA)'. This paper describes the general requirements for the proposed V&V 30 Standard, which includes; (a) applicable NRC and other regulatory requirements for defining the operational and accident domain of a nuclear system that must be considered if the system is to be licensed, (b) the corresponding calculation domain of the software that should encompass the nuclear operational and accident domain to be used to study the system behavior for licensing purposes, (c) the definition of the scaled experimental data set required to provide the basis for validating the software, (d) the ensemble of experimental data sets required to populate the validation matrix for the software in question, and (e) the practices and procedures to be used when applying a validation standard. Although this initial effort will focus on software for licensing of High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors, it is anticipated that the practices and procedures developed for this Standard can eventually be extended to other nuclear and non-nuclear applications.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: DOE - NE
• DOE Contract Number: DE-AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1030682
• Report Number(s): INL/JOU-10-19474; NEDEAU; TRN: US1106033
• Journal Information: Nuclear Engineering and Design, Vol. 241, Issue 12; ISSN 0029-5493
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
97 MATHEMATICAL METHODS AND COMPUTING
ACCIDENTS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DESIGN
ENERGY SOURCES
FLUID MECHANICS
HYPOTHETICAL ACCIDENTS
LICENSING
NUCLEAR POWER
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
REACTORS
REGULATIONS
REGULATORY GUIDES
VALIDATION
VERIFICATION
Computational fluid dynamics
Software Verification and Validation
system analysis
Thermal-fluids