Excore Modeling with VERAShift
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
It is important to be able to accurately predict the neutron flux outside the immediate reactor core for a variety of safety and material analyses. Monte Carlo radiation transport calculations are required to produce the high fidelity excore responses. Under this milestone VERA (specifically the VERAShift package) has been extended to perform excore calculations by running radiation transport calculations with Shift. This package couples VERA-CS with Shift to perform excore tallies for multiple state points concurrently, with each component capable of parallel execution on independent domains. Specifically, this package performs fluence calculations in the core barrel and vessel, or, performs the requested tallies in any user-defined excore regions. VERAShift takes advantage of the general geometry package in Shift. This gives VERAShift the flexibility to explicitly model features outside the core barrel, including detailed vessel models, detectors, and power plant details. A very limited set of experimental and numerical benchmarks is available for excore simulation comparison. The Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) has developed a set of excore benchmark problems to include as part of the VERA-CS verification and validation (V&V) problems. The excore capability in VERAShift has been tested on small representative assembly problems, multiassembly problems, and quarter-core problems. VERAView has also been extended to visualize these vessel fluence results from VERAShift. Preliminary vessel fluence results for quarter-core multistate calculations look very promising. Further development is needed to determine the details relevant to excore simulations. Validation of VERA for fluence and excore detectors still needs to be performed against experimental and numerical results.
- 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:
- 1357986
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/TM-2017/219; CASL-U-2017-1311-000
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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