Qualification of the Taiwan Power Company’s Pressurized Water Reactor Physics Methods Using CASMO-3/SIMULATE-3

Abstract

The Studsvik Core Management System (CASMO-3/SIMULATE-3) has been validated for application to steady-state reactor physics analyses for pressurized water reactors by demonstrating its ability to obtain accurate and reliable results for various conditions and applications. The analyses validated include global reactivity calculations such as boron letdown, low-power physics test predictions, detailed pin by pin power distribution, as well as in-core detector reaction rate calculations. The calculated results have been compared to measured data of 13 cycles for Maanshan Units 1 and 2 as well as measured critical experiments, and the accuracies of the method have been quantified. The validation results indicate that the Taiwan Power Company's steady-state reactor physics methodology performs to a level of accuracy sufficient for the intended applications, and the accuracies in general are slightly better than the world-wide applications.