Enhancement of Safety Analysis Capability for a CANDU-6 Reactor Using RELAP-CANDU/SCAN Coupled Code System

The purpose of this study is the development and verification of the coupled code system SCAN and RELAP-CANDU for transient analysis of a Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactor. For this purpose, a spatial kinetics calculation module is developed and implemented in SCAN, a three-dimensional (3-D) CANDU-pressurized heavy water reactor neutronics design and analysis code. Then, a dynamic linked library of the SCAN code is generated for the integration with RELAP-CANDU.

The RELAP-CANDU code has been developed for best-estimate transient simulation of CANDU reactor coolant systems based on the RELAP5 code. The SCAN code is a 3-D neutronic calculation code, which is composed of both unified nodal methods based on coarse-mesh finite difference method solutions to the time-dependent two-group diffusion equations.

To verify the reliability of the coupled code system RELAP-CANDU/SCAN, the 40% reactor inlet header break accident, the 100% reactor outlet header break accident, and the pump suction pipe break are analyzed. The proposed coupled thermal-hydraulic and neutronic analyses methodology shows that there is an important margin in the traditional accident analysis.