Nuclear Data Sensitivity and Uncertainty Study for the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Benchmark Using RMC and SCALE

oleh: Chengjian Jin, Shichang Liu, Shenghao Zhang, Jingang Liang, Yixue Chen

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: MDPI AG 2022-12-01

Deskripsi

In order to improve the safety and economy of nuclear reactors, it is necessary to analyze the sensitivity and uncertainty (S/U) of the nuclear data. The capabilities of S/U analysis has been developed in the Reactor Monte Carlo code RMC, using the iterated fission probability (IFP) method and the superhistory method. In this paper, the S/U capabilities of RMC are applied to a typical PWR benchmark B&W’s Core XI, and compared with the multigroup and continuous-energy S/U capabilities in the SCALE code system. The S/U results of the RMC-IFP method and the RMC-superhistory method are compared with TSUNAMI-CE/MG in SCALE. The sensitivity results and the uncertainty results of major nuclides that contribute a lot to the uncertainties in <i>k<sub>eff</sub></i> are in good agreement in both RMC and SCALE. The RMC-superhistory method has the same precision as the IFP method, but it reduces the memory footprint by more than 95% and only doubles the running time. The superhistory method has obvious advantages when there are many nuclides and reaction types to be analyzed. In addition, the total uncertainties in the <i>k<sub>eff</sub></i> of the first-order uncertainty quantification method are compared with the stochastic sampling method, and the maximum relative deviation of total uncertainties in the <i>k<sub>eff</sub></i> is 8.53%. Verification shows that the capabilities of S/U analysis developed in the RMC code has good accuracy.