Qualification of the ARROTTA Code for Light Water Reactor Accident Analysis

Abstract

Qualification efforts have been performed by the Taiwan Power Company (TPC) and the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) for the three-dimensional spatial kinetics code ARROTTA for light water reactor (LWR) core transient analysis. Together TPC and INER started a 5-yr project in 1989 to establish independent capabilities to perform reload design and transient analysis utilizing state-of-the-art computer programs. As part of the effort, the ARROTTA code was chosen to perform multidimensional kinetics calculations such as rod ejection for pressurized water reactors and rod drop for boiling water reactors (BWR). To qualify ARROTTA for evaluation of the Final Safety Analysis Report licensing basis core transients, ARROTTA has been benchmarked for the static core analysis against plant measured data and SIMULATE-3 predictions, and for the kinetic analysis against available benchmark problems. The static calculations compared include critical boron concentration, core power distribution, and control rod worth. The results indicate that ARROTTA predictions match very well with plant measured data and SIMULATE-3 predictions. The kinetic benchmark problems validated include the Nuclear Energy Agency Committee on Reactor Physics rod ejection problem, the three-dimensional Langenbuch-Maurer-Werner LWR rod withdrawal/insertion problem, and the three-dimensional linear regression analysis BWR transient benchmark problem. The results indicate that ARROTTA'smore » accuracy and stability are excellent as compared with other space-time kinetics codes. It is therefore concluded that ARROTTA provides accurate predictions for multidimensional core transients for LWRs.« less