A Serpent2-SUBCHANFLOW-TRANSURANUS coupling for pin-by-pin depletion calculations in Light Water Reactors

Safety and Performance Aspects in the Development and Qualification of High Burnup Nuclear Fuels for Water Cooled Reactors

“…Owing to the more detailed description of HBU fuel behaviour in the TRANSURANUS code, in combination with higher computational power, high fidelity simulations for the reactor safety analysis have been initiated within the McSAFE project. These include pin-by-pin simulations of PWRs or WWERs by means of the coupled Serpent-Subchanflow-TRANSURANUS code system [51,52]. This work is being extended to simulate fuel rods with accident tolerant materials such as FeCrAl cladding and U3Si2 fuel in various water cooled SMRs such as the Nuscale reactor within the McSAFER project [53].…”

Towards grain-scale modelling of the release of radioactive fission gas from oxide fuel. Part II: Coupling SCIANTIX with TRANSURANUS

“…4), and the release-to-birth ratio (R/B) of short-lived fission gases, with half-live between 5.29 days ( 133 Xe) and 3.18 min ( 89 Kr). We reproduce the CONTACT 1 experiment using the TRANSURANUS mechanistic fission gas behaviour model with its standard parameters [9,10,30] and the TRANSURANUS//SCIANTIX coupled-code version, which relies on the SCIANTIX [11] fission gas behaviour description 6 with its default model parameters for the stable and radioactive fission gas 6 At the inter-granular level, both models consider a mechanistic description of the grain-boundary bubble growth, coalescence, and interconnection (that determine the grain-boundary swelling and fission gas release) but differ in the adopted coalescence model. In addition, SCIANTIX includes a physics-based model for the evolution of the intra-granular fission gas bubbles coupled to the aforementioned grain-boundary model, which also affects the fission gas release and swelling prediction [42].…”

The H2020 McSAFER Project: Main Goals, Technical Work Program, and Status

“…Hence, in the McSAFER project, selected thermal hydraulic experiments are performed at different laboratories (LUT, KIT, KTH) using SMRrelevant mock-ups ranging from fuel rod arrangements to a full reactor circuit model including all major components, such as helical heat exchangers. For neutronic parameters at the pin level, where no experimental data are available, the Monte Carlo-based high-fidelity simulations developed under the H2020 McSAFE project are used as a reference solution of nodal diffusion codes in combination with a pin power reconstruction or transport-based pin-by-pin simulations at both normal and accidental core conditions [23,24].…”