VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION OF BACK-END CYCLE SOURCE TERM CALCULATION OF THE NODAL CODE RAST-K

Department of Nuclear Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, 50 UNIST-gil, Ulsan, 44919, Republic of Korea

^* Corresponding author. Email: deokjung@unist.ac.kr
skansms0@unist.ac.kr
ebiwonjumi@unist.ac.kr
poryor@unist.ac.kr
jinsu@unist.ac.kr

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

Verification and validation (V&V) results of source term calculation capability implemented in the nodal diffusion code RAST-K are presented in this paper. An isotope inventory prediction method is presented in this work which is implemented with RAST-K and the lattice code STREAM. STREAM generates cross-section and provides number density information by history branch calculations. RAST-K supplies the power history and three history indexes (boron concentration, moderator temperature and fuel temperature). The main feature of the newly implemented spent nuclear fuel (SNF) characterization is the direct consideration of three-dimensional (3D) core simulation conditions by using operation history information. As a result of this, it could reduce the computation time. The implemented SNF analysis capability have two main functions. The first is to predict isotope inventory by Lagrange non-linear interpolation method, using power history correction factors. The second is to calculate the radiological response activity, decay heat, and neutron/gamma source strengths. The V&V of these two functions are thus presented herein. The isotope inventory prediction is validated with measured data from ten SNF samples of Takahama-3 and six samples of Calvert Cliffs-1 pressurized water reactors (PWR). Eighteen decay heat measurements of Ringhals Unit 3 PWR fuel assemblies are then employed to validate the decay heat calculation results. In addition, STREAM is employed in a code-to-code comparison for verification. The fuel assemblies cover the burnup range 14.3 - 47.25 GWd/tU, initial enrichment of 2.1 - 4.11 ²³⁵U w/o and cooling time of 3.96 to 20.01 years. The comparison to STREAM shows the accuracy of the RAST-K SNF and prediction of the decay heat is within 4%. Overall, this paper demonstrates that RAST-K SNF calculation can be applied to the back-end cycle source term analysis.