Watts Bar Unit 2 Startup Results with VERA
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Knoxville, TN (United States)
CASL members TVA, Westinghouse, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have successfully completed a detailed simulation of the initial startup of Watts Bar Nuclear Unit 2 (WBN2) using the advanced reactor simulation tools known as VERA. WBN2 is the first commercial power reactor to join the nation’s electrical grid in over two decades, and the modern core design and availability of data make it an excellent benchmark for CASL. Calculations were performed three months prior to the startup, and in the first blind application of VERA to a new reactor, predicted criticality and physics parameters very close to those later measured by TVA. Subsequent calculations with the latest version of VERA and using exact measurement conditions improved the results even further.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs (CASL)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1355891
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/TM-2017/194; CASL-U-2017-1306-000
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Status of the OECD/NEA Watts Bar unit 1 benchmark and calculations of local reactor core power data of the Zero Power physics tests
Watts Bar I ex-core analyses using VERA - 25430