A coupled neutronic/thermal–hydraulic module for the transient analysis of VVER-1000 reactor during reactivity insertion accidents

Abstract

For the safety analysis of nuclear power plants, it is essential to provide a simple and fast model to investigate the time-dependent behavior of reactor cores. Most research papers in this field have generally been limited to use coupling techniques between existing codes. In this paper, an integrated module called CMS (nuclear reactor Core Modular Simulator) is proposed to simulate the transient thermo-neutronic behavior of a VVER-1000 reactor core during reactivity insertion accidents. CMS contains three modules: a neutronic module based on the point kinetic equations, a thermal-hydraulic module based on the time-dependent single heated channel approximation and a reactivity calculation one. A two-stage fourth order implicit Runge-Kutta method was used for solving the point kinetics equations and the homogeneous two-phase flow model was considered for the thermal-hydraulic part. To verify the proposed module, two reactivity insertion accidents of the Bushehr VVER-1000 reactor, a design basis accident and an anticipated operational occurrence, have been simulated and the obtained results have been compared with its final safety analysis report showing a good agreement.