Benchmarking of the WIMS9/PARCS/TRACE code system for neutronic calculations of the Westinghouse AP1000™ reactor

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to assess the accuracy of the WIMS9/PARCS/TRACE code system for power density calculations of the Westinghouse AP1000™ nuclear reactor, as a representative of modern pressurized water reactors (Gen III+). The cross section libraries were generated using the lattice physics code WIMS9 (the commercial version of the legacy lattice code WIMSD). Nine different fuel assembly types were analyzed in WIMS9 to generate the two-group cross sections required by the PARCS core simulator. The nine fuel assembly types were identified based on the distribution of Pyrex discrete burnable absorber (Borosilicate glass) and integral fuel burnable absorber (IFBA) rods in each fuel assembly. The generated cross sections were passed to the coupled core simulator PARCS/TRACE which performed 3-D, full-core diffusion calculations from within the US NRC Symbolic Nuclear Analysis Package (SNAP) interface. The results which included: assembly power distribution, effective multiplication factor (keff), radial and axial power density, and whole core depletion were compared to reference Monte Carlo results and to a published reactor data available in the AP1000 Design Control Document (DCD). The results of the study show acceptable accuracy of the WIMS9/PARCS/TRACE code in predicting the power density of the AP1000 core and, hence, establish its adequacy in the evaluation of the neutronics parameters of modern PWRs of similar designs. The work reported here is new in that it uses, for the first time, the combination of WIMS9/PARCS/TRACE codes to perform neutronics calculation for the Westinghouse’ AP1000™ reactor, as a representative of modern PWRs, with its challenging core configuration.