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Return of the HB Line at SRS
The Department of Energy is bringing the HB Line facility at the Savannah River Site back on line to recycle surplus plutonium and produce uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for advanced reactors.
Restarting the facility will be a multiyear process and will yield opportunities for increased domestic production of isotopes with scientific and commercial value. The DOE said that once operational, the HB Line will accelerate the Office of Environmental Management’s plutonium disposition mission by 10 to 13 years while reducing the existing cost.
Brendan Kochunas, Benjamin Collins, Shane Stimpson, Robert Salko, Daniel Jabaay, Aaron Graham, Yuxuan Liu, Kang Seog Kim, William Wieselquist, Andrew Godfrey, Kevin Clarno, Scott Palmtag, Thomas Downar, Jess Gehin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 185 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 217-231
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-39
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the methodology developed and implemented in the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications Core Simulator (VERA-CS) to perform high-fidelity, pressurized water reactor (PWR), multicycle, core physics calculations. Depletion of the core with pin-resolved power and nuclide detail is a significant advance in the state of the art for reactor analysis, providing the level of detail necessary to address the problems of the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Reactor Simulation Hub, the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL). VERA-CS has three main components: the neutronics solver MPACT, the thermal-hydraulic (T-H) solver COBRA-TF (CTF), and the nuclide transmutation solver ORIGEN. This paper focuses on MPACT and provides an overview of the resonance self-shielding methods, macroscopic-cross-section calculation, two-dimensional/one-dimensional (2-D/1-D) transport, nuclide depletion, T-H feedback, and other supporting methods representing a minimal set of the capabilities needed to simulate high-fidelity models of a commercial nuclear reactor. Results are presented from the simulation of a model of the first cycle of Watts Bar Unit 1. The simulation is within 16 parts per million boron (ppmB) reactivity for all state points compared to cycle measurements, with an average reactivity bias of <5 ppmB for the entire cycle. Comparisons to cycle 1 flux map data are also provided, and the average 2-D root-mean-square (rms) error during cycle 1 is 1.07%. To demonstrate the multicycle capability, a state point at beginning of cycle (BOC) 2 was also simulated and compared to plant data. The comparison of the cycle 2 BOC state has a reactivity difference of +3 ppmB from measurement, and the 2-D rms of the comparison in the flux maps is 1.77%. These results provide confidence in VERA-CS’s capability to perform high-fidelity calculations for practical PWR reactor problems.