Development of a three-dimensional transport kinetics capability for LWR-MOX analyses

Journal Article · Thu Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1998 · Transactions of the American Nuclear Society

OSTI ID:298338

Taiwo, T; Ragland, R; Palmiotti, G; Finck, P J ^[1]

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1. Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)

Disposition of weapons-grade Pu may involve the irradiation of mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel assemblies in commercial light water reactors (LWRs). While the optimal disposition strategy will eventually require the use of 100% MOX core loadings, there will be a substantial intermediate phase of partial MOX loadings. For these core loadings, relatively important transport effects arise at the UO{sub 2}-MOX interfaces; this leads to computational difficulties for predicting power distributions and certain reactivity coefficients such as rod worths or loss of coolant with the standard diffusion theory codes that are typically used to assess the transient behavior of LWR cores. In view of the expected transport effects, the validity of these codes will need to be verified for preparing safety cases. Unfortunately, there exists no clean transient experimental data for these specific cases; thus, it is proposed to validate the standard codes by comparison to reference transport kinetics schemes. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has started implementing a public domain suite of codes to provide for a reference capability to perform independent assessment of MOX core physics. The lattice physics calculations are performed with DRAGON and its fine group ENDF/B-VI and JEF-2.2 libraries. Preliminary validation work has demonstrated the quality of this combination. Static three-dimensional core transport calculations are performed with VARIANT using either a standard nodal representation or a novel pin-by-pin capability. Kinetics transport calculations are performed with VARIANT-K, whose characteristics and performances are discussed in this paper.

• OSTI ID: 298338
• Report Number(s): CONF-981106--
• Journal Information: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Journal Name: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society Vol. 79; ISSN 0003-018X; ISSN TANSAO
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
COMPUTER CODES
MIXED OXIDE FUELS
NUCLEAR WEAPONS DISMANTLEMENT
REACTOR KINETICS
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
WATER COOLED REACTORS