Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

For CANDU reactors to continue to be an important contributor to the Ontario energy supply they have to satisfy ever increasing economic and safety demands. In particular, increasingly accurate and detailed simulation models are required for the safety analysis of existing, as well as future, CANDU reactors. The broad objective of this work is twofold: To develop a new, more accurate, method for calculating the neutron power distribution in a nuclear reactor by using advanced homogenization methods and to develop detailed CANDU-specific benchmark problems to test the newly-developed method, as well as other methods and codes in current use in the Canadian nuclear industry. The newly-developed improved homogenization methods will increase the accuracy of simulation tools available to Canadian industry specialists and researchers for the analysis of existing reactors and for the design of new reactors. Developed CANDU benchmarks will be used for the evaluation of existing as well as emerging reactor-physics computational tools.