McCARD for neutronics design and analysis of research reactor cores

Highlights: • McCARD is a Monte Carlo neutron–photon transport simulation code. • Various scripting functions in McCARD help to model complex reactor geometry. • McCARD is used for the neutronics analyses of KUCA, HANARO, and YALINA. - Abstract: McCARD is a Monte Carlo (MC) neutron–photon transport simulation code developed exclusively for the neutronics design and analysis of nuclear reactor cores. McCARD is equipped with the hierarchical modeling and scripting functions, the CAD-based geometry processing module, the adjoint-weighted kinetics parameter and source multiplication factor estimation modules as well as the burnup analysis capability for the neutronics design and analysis of both research and power reactor cores. This paper highlights applicability of McCARD for the research reactor core neutronics analysis, as demonstrated for Kyoto University Critical Assembly, HANARO, and YALINA