Calculation of xenon-oscillations in the HPLWR

The European version of the Supercritical Water Cooled Reactor (SCWR) is being developed under the name High Performance Light Water Reactor (HPLWR). In the most recent design, a three-pass core is foreseen with a heat-up of the coolant (supercritical pressure water) from 280degC to 500degC. Due to the operating pressure of 25 MPa, there is no phase change in the core but the density drop of the coolant can be as high as one order of magnitude. This results in a system which is sensitive to local temperature, power and density oscillations. This attribute is enhanced by the pseudocritical transformation of supercritical pressure water. Due to the relatively large dimensions of the core, xenon-oscillations are probable. The characteristic time of this process is several hours, thus a coupled quasi-stationary neutronics-thermohydraulics (CQNT) code completed with the xenon poisoning differential equations (XPDE) can predict the extent of xenon-oscillations. A program system is being developed at the Budapest University of Technology which is capable to perform full core CQNT calculations including the XPDE. The program system is designed to calculate one-pass (which was the first core proposal for HPLWRs, today called PWR-SC) and three-pass cores. The CQNT code is made up of an MCNP part (neutronics part) and of a thermohydraulics part developed at our Institute. Since full core MCNP calculations are very time consuming, upon symmetry considerations only one eighth of the core is modelled. On the other hand, this approach of modelling momentarily limits the phenomena which can be studied to axial oscillations. (author)