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Title: Verification and Validation of the ENDF/B-VII.1 v4.3m1 MPACT 51-Group Cross Section Library

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1543240· OSTI ID:1543240

The MPACT neutronics module of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) core simulator is a 3-D whole core transport code being developed for the Virtual Environment for Reactor Analysis (VERA) CASL toolset. Key characteristics of the MPACT code include (1) a subgroup method for resonance selfshielding and (2) a whole-core transport solver with a 2-D/1-D synthesis method. The MPACT code requires a cross section library to support all of its core simulation capabilities; a cross section library would be MPACT’s most influencing component for simulation accuracy. Due to the limitation of computing capacity even in high performance computing, the cross section library must be developed to enhance computational efficiency in memory and computing time without losing accuracy and generality. This requires a very coarse energy group structure with about 50 groups. Multigroup (MG) neutron cross section libraries for the CASL VERA-CS neutronics simulator MPACT have been created by using the AMPX/SCALE code package developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). A new 51-group structure was developed for efficient simulation to be applicable for both pressurized water reactor (PWR) and boiling water reactor (BWR) simulations. New v4.3m1 MPACT 51-group library with the ENDF/B- VII.1 nuclear data were developed for MPACT. Since SCALE KENO has some issues in the probability table and has a low cutoff energy for the free gas model, this issue has been corrected. This study focused on the development of the ENDF/B-VII.1 v4.3m1 MPACT MG library, including verification and validation. This document includes the library generation methodology and procedure, the verification procedure, and benchmark results compared to continuous energy Monte Carlo results using newly developed cross section libraries.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1543240
Report Number(s):
ORNL/TM-2018/792
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English