Pressurized Water Reactor Mixed Oxide/UO2 Transient Benchmark Calculations Using Monte Carlo Serpent 2 Code and Open Nodal Core Simulator ADPRES

Abstract

This paper presents static and transient solutions for the pressurized water reactor (PWR) MOX/UO2 transient benchmark by Serpent 2 Monte Carlo (MC) code and open nodal core simulator called Abu Dhabi Polytechnic Reactor Simulator (ADPRES). The presence of mixed oxide (MOX) fuels and burn-up variation in the benchmark pose challenges for reactor simulators due to severe flux gradient across fuel assemblies. In this work, the two-step method was used, in which the assembly level two-group constants were generated from single assembly calculations with zero net current boundary conditions using Serpent 2 Monte Carlo code, and later the core calculation was performed using ADPRES open nodal core simulator. Two types of diffusion coefficients were generated: the conventional B1 leakage corrected and the cumulative migration method (CMM). Finally, the solutions of Serpent 2/ADPRES, including multiplication factor, power distribution, control rod (CR) worth, and critical boron concentration (CBC) using both diffusion coefficients, were compared against solutions from heterogeneous Serpent 2 calculations where the fuel and cladding are explicitly modeled. The reactor power during transients was also compared qualitatively against other nodal core simulators. The results showed that Serpent 2/ADPRES were able to predict the heterogeneous Monte Carlo solutions very well with reasonable differences. The transient solutions were also quite accurate compared to other nodal core simulators. For the diffusion coefficients comparison, it was found that the CMM diffusion coefficient provides more accurate solutions for the benchmark compared to the B1 leakage corrected diffusion coefficients.