U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Nuclear Plant Analyzer

The Nuclear Plant Analyzer (NPA) is a state-of-the-art safety analysis and engineering tool being used to address key nuclear safety issues. Under the sponsorship of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the NPA integrates the NRC's computerized reactor behavior simulation codes such as RELAP5, TRAC-BWR, and TRAC-PWR, with well-developed color graphics programs and large repositories of reactor design and experimental data. The NPA project is jointly conducted with the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). EGandG Idaho serves as overall project coordinator for the NRC. The NPA became operational in late 1983 at the Idaho Natinal Engineering Laboratory (INEL). This paper presents an overview of the NPA system, discuss several recent applications using the NPA with various simulation codes, and concludes with a brief discussion on future NPA development