Development of the core safety regulation technology for the SMART-P

As the SMART-P is different from existing general reactors, new regulation technology is required to understand and assess the SMART-P for its regulatory reviews. One of the these technologies is related to the core design analysis. Because the SMART-P used metallic fuels, this study also collects general metallic nuclear fuel data and SMART-P's metallic fuel data from the materials studied by KAERI. The core design methodologies of KWU, ABB-CE, Westinghouse, Studsvik, Scandpower, US NRC and domestic research centers were investigated. Specially, The Hellios lattice core was studied for hexagonal nuclear fuel assembly calculation. Also, the VVER-1000 benchmark problem was analyzed by the PARCS code which has been developed by U.S. NRC. In this study, a AFEN-based computing code KORDAX os developed for the regulatory review of the SMART-P. KORDAX which is a nodal code using AFEN method dose not use transverse integration and this it can give higher accuracy results. Also, Because KORDAX is useful for hexagonal core and uses a method different with the core design code of the SMART-P developed by KAERI, it is judged that KORDAX can be an independent and reliable regulation verification code. In the next year study, HELIOS will be further studied as a core lattice code, and a hexagonal kinetics code which is based on AFEN method will be developed more systematically