Modeling, Performance Assessment, and Nodal Data Analysis of TRISO-Fueled Systems with Shift

Technical Report · Fri Oct 14 04:00:00 EDT 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1905392· OSTI ID:1905392

Pandya, Tara ^[1]; Bostelmann, Friederike ^[1]; Jessee, Matthew ^[1]; Ghaddar, Tarek ^[1]; Britt, Philip ^[1]; Johnson, Seth R. ^[1]

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1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

This technical report documents several enhancements to the Shift Monte Carlo (MC) code under the US Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program in fiscal year (FY) 2022. Performance enhancements were added to Shift specifically for tristructural isotropic (TRISO)–fueled reactor systems and guided based on performance analysis in FY 2021. For the pebble performance model developed in previous studies, the runtime improved by ~ 91× compared to the original model and ~ 2× compared to the user-optimized model. Compared to Serpent, Shift is ~ 3× slower if Serpent delta-tracking is enabled but ~ 2× faster when delta-tracking is disabled. The multigroup cross section generation was improved through simplifying tally input definitions, porting several post-processing tally operations from Python scripts into the Shift code base, and accounting for production reactions in the scattering multiplicity. Progress was also made on two emerging capabilities: (1) the development of Titan (a Shift reactor physics user interface) and (2) initial investigation into path-length tallies for computing multigroup scattering matrices.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725; AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1905392
• Report Number(s): ORNL/TM-2022/2601
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
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