Feasibility Investigation of Application of MPACT to Core Design Studies of NBSR-2, a Heavy Water-Reflected, Heterogeneous LEU Fuel Research Reactor

Published

May 1, 2016

Author(s)

Bryan Daniel Eyers, Zeyun NMN Wu, Brendan Kochunas

Abstract

Engineers at NIST would like to use the VERA software suite developed by CASL to study a new 20 MW research reactor design called NBSR-2, which uses heterogeneous MTR-type LEU fuel plates, a light water coolant, and heavy water reflector. These features are a significant departure from the PWR-type power reactors previously benchmarked in VERA. Comparable 2-D models of NBSR-2 were developed in both MPACT and MCNP6, and the MPACT model was benchmarked to within 120 pcm and 1.5% mean error in fast and thermal flux distributions. This work is intended to facilitate additional design studies of NBSR-2 with VERA software in the future, and to assess the maturity of MPACT's ability to model non-PWR reactors.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the PHYSOR 2016 Meeting in Sun Valley, ID, May 2016.

Volume

N/A

Issue

N/A

Conference Dates

May 1-5, 2016

Conference Location

Sun Valley, ID

Conference Title

PHYSOR 2016: Unifying Theory and Experiments in the 21st Century

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

MPACT, Validation, MCNP, NBSR-2, Cold Neutron

Citation

, B. , , Z. and Kochunas, B. (2016), Feasibility Investigation of Application of MPACT to Core Design Studies of NBSR-2, a Heavy Water-Reflected, Heterogeneous LEU Fuel Research Reactor, Proceedings of the PHYSOR 2016 Meeting in Sun Valley, ID, May 2016., Sun Valley, ID, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=920523 (Accessed October 25, 2025)