J. Li, “Monte Carlo Investigation of the UK’s First EPR Nuclear Reactor Startup Core using Serpent,” Energies, vol. 13, 19, 5168, October 2020. doi: 10.3390/en13195168
J. Li, “Monte Carlo Investigation of the UK’s First EPR Nuclear Reactor Startup Core using Serpent,” Energies, vol. 13, 19, 5168, October 2020. doi: 10.3390/en13195168
J. Li, “Monte Carlo Investigation of the UK’s First EPR Nuclear Reactor Startup Core using Serpent,” Energies, vol. 13, 19, 5168, October 2020. doi: 10.3390/en13195168
J. Li, “Monte Carlo Investigation of the UK’s First EPR Nuclear Reactor Startup Core using Serpent,” Energies, vol. 13, 19, 5168, October 2020. doi: 10.3390/en13195168
Abstract
Computationally modelling a nuclear reactor startup core for a benchmark against the existing models is highly desirable for an independent assessment informing nuclear engineers and energy policymakers. This work presents a startup core model of the UK’s first Evolutionary Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) based on Monte Carlo simulations of particle collisions using Serpent 2, a continuous-energy Monte Carlo reactor physics burnup code. Coupling between neutronics and thermal-hydraulic conditions with the fuel depletion is incorporated into the multi-dimensional branches, obtaining the thermal flux and fission rate (power) distributions radially and axially from the three dimensional (3D) single assembly level to a 3D full core. Shannon entropy is employed to characterise the convergence of the fission source distribution, with 3 billion neutron histories tracked by parallel computing. Source biasing is applied for the variance reduction. Benchmarking the proposed Monte Carlo 3D full-core model against the traditional deterministic transport computation suite used by the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), a reasonably good agreement within statistics is demonstrated for the safety-related reactivity coefficients, which creates trust in the EPR safety report.
Keywords
computational neutronics; European Pressurised Reactor; Monte Carlo simulation; nuclear physics; nuclear reactor core modelling; nuclear energy; nuclear power; nuclear safety; Shannon entropy; thermal hydraulics
Subject
Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
