Applicability of the diffusion and simplified P3 theories for pin-by-pin geometry of BWR

The pin-by-pin fine-mesh core calculation method is considered as a candidate next-generation core calculation method for BWR. In this study, the diffusion and simplified P3 (SP3) theories are applied to the BWR pin-by-pin fine-mesh calculation. The performances of the diffusion and SP3 theories for cell-homogeneous pin-by-pin fine-mesh calculation for BWR are evaluated through comparison with a cell-heterogeneous detailed transport calculation by the method of characteristics (MOC). Two-dimensional, 2x2 multi-assemblies geometry is used to compare the prediction accuracies of the diffusion and SP3 theories. The 2x2 multi-assemblies geometry consists of 9x9 UO2 fuel assemblies that have two different enrichment splittings. To minimize the cell-homogenization error, the SPH method is applied for the pin-by-pin fine-mesh calculation. The SPH method is a technique that reproduces a result of heterogeneous calculation using that of homogeneous calculation. The calculation results indicated that the diffusion theory shows a discrepancy larger than that of the SP3 theory on the pin-wise fission rate distribution. In contrast to the diffusion theory, the SP3 theory shows a much better accuracy on the pin-wise fission rate distribution. The computation time using the SP3 theory is about 1.5 times longer than that using the diffusion theory. The BWR core analysis consists of various calculations, e.g., the cross section interpolation, neutron flux calculation, thermal hydraulic calculation, and burn-up calculation. The function of the calculation time for the neutron flux calculation is usually less than half in the typical BWR core analysis. Therefore, the difference in the calculation time between the diffusion and SP3 theories would have no significant impact on the calculation time of the BWR core analysis. For these reasons, the SP3 theory is more suitable than the diffusion theory and is expected to have sufficient accuracy for the 2x2 multi-assemblies geometry used in this study, which simulates a typical situation of the actual BWR core. (author)