Development of Decay Heat Model for RAST-K

Abstract

Decay heat (DH) is the heat produced through a radioactive decay of fission products during or after a reactor operation. It is known as the second largest source of power in the core after fission. Being such a strong contributor to reactor power, it should be accurately determined at any time of reactor operation. Currently, there are two main approaches for DH estimation used in reactor simulation codes. One approach is based on careful inventorying of all produced target nuclides and their individual contributions to total power. Alternatively, the other popular approach is based on collapsing all target fission products into a small number of groups similar to delayed neutron estimation techniques. However, the last (multigroup) method currently has limitations when used in some transient scenarios such as transients occurred in fresh fuel. In this study, the multigroup method was further developed for reducing limitations while retaining the advantage in computation speed. Then, it was implemented into Reactor Analysis code for Steady state and Transient (RAST-K) and tested against other codes. As a result, the improved method was found capable of determining DH power at all tested stages of reactor operation under any tested operation scenario. In particular, the test simulations using the improved method showed better results in those scenarios that were under accuracy limitations of the original multigroup method. Overall, the quality of transient calculations in RAST-K was improved when using the newly implemented DH module.