VALIDATION OF NEW CMS5-VVER NUCLEAR DATA LIBRARY USING CRITICAL EXPERIMENTS AND X2 FULL-CORE BENCHMARK

29th Symposium of AER on VVER Reactor Physics and Reactor Safety (2019, Energoland, Mochovce NPP, Slovakia)
[2] reactor physics experiments and code validation

Authors

Rodolfo Ferrer and Tamer Bahadir

Abstract

Studsvik’s in-core fuel management code package CMS5-VVER, which includes the CASMO5-VVER advanced lattice physics code and SIMULATE5-VVER three-dimensional nodal code, is currently in use for VVER-1000/1200 reactor analysis. Preliminary validation of CASMO5-VVER has been presented for various critical experiments using the ENDF/B-VII.1-based nuclear data library. Analogously, benchmarking of SIMULATE5-VVER for the X2 VVER-1000 benchmark has also been presented in previous publications using the same data library.
Recently, a new commercially available CASMO5-VVER nuclear data library has been generated based on the ENDF/B-VIII.0 evaluation. The ENDF/B-VIII.0 evaluation represents the state-of-the-art in nuclear data and features new incident-neutron cross section evaluations from the CIELO project for 1H, 16O, 56Fe, 235U, 238U and 239Pu. A summary of the main features and validation of the new CASMO5-VVER ENDF/B-VIII.0-based data library, referred to as E8R0 library, are presented in this work. Comparisons of predicted criticality and fission rate distributions to measurements from various hexagonal-lattice critical experiments, such as the ZR-6 (TIC) and P-Facility, along with CMS5-VVER benchmarking of the E8R0 library to the X2 full-core benchmark for Cycles 1 through 4, will be presented and discussed in this work.