Benchmark Analysis of a Prismatic Type-high Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor with the ENDF/B-VII.0, ENDF/B-VII.1 and ENDF/B-VIII.0 Nuclear Data Libraries

Abstract

In this work we performed a benchmark analysis of the High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) fully-loaded start-up critical core with a 30-bundle loading configuration using the Monte Carlo code Serpent 2 with the recently released nuclear data libraries ENDF/B-VII.0, ENDF/B-VII.1 and ENDF/B-VIII.0. The purpose of the work is to reveal the impacts of using different ENDF nuclear data libraries on neutronics calculations of a prismatic high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR). The benchmark results obtained with Serpent 2 were compared against the available experimental values and those attained by different computer codes (MCNP5 and SCALE) using the nuclear data library ENDF/B-VII.0. The comparative results showed good agreement between Serpent 2, the experimental values, MCNP5 and SCALE. The results also exhibited a notable difference between using ENDF/B-VII.0, ENDF/B-VII.1 and ENDF/B-VIII.0 in predicting the neutronics parameters of the HTTR that suggests further investigation in future work.