NEUTRONIC BENCHMARKING OF SMALL GAS-COOLED SYSTEMS

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, TN, 37931, USA

b0e@ornl.gov
Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

To demonstrate that nuclear reactors can be built faster and more economically than they have been in the past, the US Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy is sponsoring the development of a small nuclear reactor called the Transformational Challenge Reactor (TCR) [1–2]. An important part of the design and licencing process of a new reactor is validation of the software used to analyze the reactor using established reactor physics benchmarks. This paper discusses validation of the neutronics software used to model four preliminary designs of the TCR core [2]. Because the TCR core design uses innovative technology and methods, comparable established benchmarks are limited or do not exist. For this effort, established benchmarks from the International Handbook of Evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments (ICSBEP) [3] were considered to be suitable for this design based on analysis using the SCALE/TSUNAMI-computed similarity indices to determine the amount of shared uncertainty between the design and each selected benchmark experiment. This paper addresses the challenges faced in benchmarking a unique reactor for licensing and construction, a task that will become more common as a new generation of innovative nuclear reactors are designed and built.