Abstract

The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) was established in July 2010 for the purpose of providing advanced modeling and simulation solutions for commercial nuclear reactors. The primary goal is to provide coupled, higher-fidelity, usable modeling and simulation capabilities than are currently available. These are needed to address light water reactor (LWR) operational and safety performance-defining phenomena that are not yet able to be fully modeled taking a first-principles approach. In order to pursue these goals, CASL has participation from laboratory, academic, and industry partners. These partners are pursuing the solution of ten major “Challenge Problems” in order to advance the state-of-the-art in reactor design and analysis to permit power uprates, higher burnup, life extension, and increased safety. At present, the problems being addressed by CASL are primarily reactor physics-oriented; however, this paper is intended to introduce CASL to the reactor dosimetry community because of the importance of reactor physics modelling and nuclear data to define the source term for that community and the applicability and extensibility of the transport methods being developed.

Highlights

  • The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) was established in July 2010 as a U.S Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub

  • The problems being addressed by CASL are primarily reactor physics-oriented; this paper is intended to introduce CASL to the reactor dosimetry community because of the importance of reactor physics modelling and nuclear data to define the source term for that community and the applicability and extensibility of the transport methods being developed

  • CASL’s vision is to predict the performance of nuclear reactors through comprehensive modeling and simulation technology, based on first-principles physics, which can be used throughout the commercial nuclear energy industry to enhance safety, reliability, and economics

Read more

Summary

Introduction

The CASL organization is led by Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) and CASL’s research and development activities are executed in six technical teams called Focus Areas (FA). This partnership provides unparalleled collective institutional knowledge, nuclear science and engineering talent, computational science leadership, and a strong record of LWR design and regulatory accomplishments. The main technology that drives CASL’s modeling and simulations is the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA), which provides higher-fidelity results than the current industry approach by incorporating coupled physics and science-based models, state-of-the-art numerical methods, modern computational science and software development practices, integrated uncertainty quantification (UQ) and validation against data from operating pressurized water reactors (PWRs), single-effect experiments, and integral tests. To follow the current state of the program, the CASL website [3] is a key resource which includes project summary slides [7] that make a good and succinct resource

Addressing Contemporary Challenges for LWRs
Developing and Applying Modern Virtual Reactor Technology
Developing New Collaboration Paradigms
Resources
Progress to Date
Future Work & Summary
Full Text
Paper version not known

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call