QUALIFICATION OF ANC9 GENERIC INSERT METHODOLOGY (GIM)

Westinghouse Electric Company 1000 Westinghouse Dr, Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, USA

^* Corresponding author
zhangb@westinghouse.com
ivanovbd@westinghouse.com
hoskinkc@westinghouse.com
huriahc@westinghouse.com
pereira@westinghouse.com

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

Discrete burnable poisons like the Wet Annular Burnable Absorber and Pyrex have been used in PWR core to improve core power distribution and provide more negative moderator temperature coefficient. The burnable absorber in the burnable poison rods burns fast and is completely gone after one cycle exposure in the core. Traditionally, the burnable poison rods are designed to be part of the fuel assembly. They are burned together with the fuel in the first loading cycle and discharged after one cycle. In recent years, different insertion scenarios of the burnable poison rods have been introduced in the PWR plants operation to improve the fuel performance, for instance, fresh burnable poison rods are inserted into a burned assembly; burned burnable poison rods stay in the original assembly or are replaced in a different assembly.

A Generic Insert Methodology [1] was developed in Westinghouse and implemented in NEXUS/ANC9 code system. With this new methodology, ANC9 is able to follow the assembly history and model all types of absorber insert components for all kinds of insertion scenarios.

An extensive methods validation and qualification effort has been completed by modeling different insertion cases. This paper provides details of the qualification cases along with the analysis of the results.