TY - GEN
T1 - DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGH-FIDELITY MULTI-CYCLE MODEL OF THE NUSCALE SMALL MODULAR REACTOR USING VERA
AU - Baker, Una
AU - Garrouste, Marisol
AU - Choi, Sooyoung
AU - Soto, Gabriel J.
AU - Lindley, Ben
AU - Kochunas, Brendan
N1 - Funding Information:
This research made use of the resources of the High Performance Computing Center at Idaho National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under Contract No. De-AC07-05ID14517.
Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Ross Snuggerud of NuScale Power LLC for his guidance on the design of the NuScale plant. This work was supported by funding received from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program under contract number DE-NE0008975.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - With growing renewables penetration, there is increased interest in flexible power operation for nuclear reactors. For multi-unit SMRs, in particular the NuScale SMR, there are opportunities to optimize flexible power operation across multiple units to limit the degradation of structural and control components. Here, we focus on degradation of in-core components, specifically the control rods and reactor pressure vessel. To perform these studies a high-fidelity, multi-cycle representation of the NuScale SMR is required, with a detailed representation of the structural and control components. To this end, the NuScale SMR has been modelled using the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) software. The entire transition to equilibrium is simulated, from Cycle 1 through to the equilibrium cycle. The equilibrium cycle model shows a good agreement with the NuScale design certification application (DCA) results, with differences attributable to a combination of using public domain data for the present study, and methodological differences. K-effective, power distributions, reactivity coefficients, and boron letdown curves are compared and all found to closely match. This shows that the VERA model is suitable for further studies.
AB - With growing renewables penetration, there is increased interest in flexible power operation for nuclear reactors. For multi-unit SMRs, in particular the NuScale SMR, there are opportunities to optimize flexible power operation across multiple units to limit the degradation of structural and control components. Here, we focus on degradation of in-core components, specifically the control rods and reactor pressure vessel. To perform these studies a high-fidelity, multi-cycle representation of the NuScale SMR is required, with a detailed representation of the structural and control components. To this end, the NuScale SMR has been modelled using the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) software. The entire transition to equilibrium is simulated, from Cycle 1 through to the equilibrium cycle. The equilibrium cycle model shows a good agreement with the NuScale design certification application (DCA) results, with differences attributable to a combination of using public domain data for the present study, and methodological differences. K-effective, power distributions, reactivity coefficients, and boron letdown curves are compared and all found to closely match. This shows that the VERA model is suitable for further studies.
KW - VERA
KW - load-following
KW - neutronics analysis
KW - small modular reactors
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85184958855
U2 - 10.13182/PHYSOR22-37328
DO - 10.13182/PHYSOR22-37328
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85184958855
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022
SP - 1550
EP - 1559
BT - Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022
PB - American Nuclear Society
T2 - 2022 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022
Y2 - 15 May 2022 through 20 May 2022
ER -