Nuclear power reactor analysis, methods, algorithms and computer programs

Full text: For a developing country buying its first nuclear power plants from a foreign supplier, disregarding the type and scope of the contract, there is a certain number of activities which have to be performed by local stuff and domestic organizations. This particularly applies to the choice of the nuclear fuel cycle strategy and the choice of the type and size of the reactors, to bid parameters specification, bid evaluation and final safety analysis report evaluation, as well as to in-core fuel management activities. In the Nuclear Engineering Department of the Boris Kidric Institute of Nuclear Sciences (NET IBK) the continual work is going on, related to the following topics: cross section and resonance integral calculations, spectrum calculations, generation of group constants, lattice and cell problems, criticality and global power distribution search, fuel burnup analysis, in-core fuel management procedures, cost analysis and power plant economics, safety and accident analysis, shielding problems and environmental impact studies, etc. The present paper gives the details of the methods developed and the results achieved, with the particular emphasis on the NET IBK computer program package for the needs of planning, construction and operation of nuclear power plants. The main problems encountered so far were related to small working team, lack of large and powerful computers, absence of reliable basic nuclear data and shortage of experimental and empirical results for testing theoretical models. Some of these difficulties have been overcome thanks to bilateral and multilateral cooperation with developed countries, mostly through IAEA. It is the authors opinion, however, that mutual cooperation of developing countries, having similar problems and similar goals, could lead to significant results. Some activities of this kind are suggested and discussed. (author)