SCALE-4 Analysis of Pressurized Water Reactor Critical Configurations: Volume 3-Surry Unit 1 Cycle 2

The requirements of ANSI/ANS 8.1 specify that calculational methods for away-from-reactor criticality safety analyses be validated against experimental measurements. If credit for the negative reactivity of the depleted (or spent) fuel isotopics is desired, it is necessary to benchmark computational methods against spent fuel critical configurations. This report summarizes a portion of the ongoing effort to benchmark away-from-reactor criticality analysis methods using selected critical configurations from commercial pressurized-water reactors. The analysis methodology selected for all the calculations in this report is based on the codes and data provided in the SCALE-4 code system. The isotopic densities for the spent fuel assemblies in the critical configurations were calculated using the SAS2H analytical sequence of the SCALE-4 system. The sources of data and the procedures for deriving SAS2H input parameters are described in detail. The SNIKR code module was used to extract the necessary isotopic densities from the SAS2H results and to provide the data in the format required by the SCALE criticality analysis modules. The CSASN analytical sequence in SCALE-4 was used to perform resonance processing of the cross sections. The KENO V.a module of SCALE-4 was used to calculate the effective multiplication factor (keff) of each case. The SCALE-4 27-group burnup library containing ENDF/B-IV (actinides) and ENDF/B-V (fission products) data was used for all the calculations. This volume of the report documents the SCALE system analysis of two reactor critical configurations for Surry Unit 1 Cycle 2. This unit and cycle were chosen for a previous analysis using a different methodology because detailed isotopics from multidimensional reactor calculations were available from the Virginia Power Company. These data permitted a direct comparison of criticality calculations using the utility-calculated isotopics with those using the isotopics generated by the SCALE-4 SAS2H sequence. These reactor critical benchmarks have been reanalyzed using the methodology described above. The two benchmark critical calculations were the beginning-of-cycle (BOC) startup at hot, zero-power (HZP) and an end-of-cycle (EOC) critical at hot, full-power (HFP) critical conditions. These calculations were used to check for consistency in the calculated results for different burnup, downtime, temperature, xenon, and boron conditions. The keff results were 1.0014 and 1.0113, respectively, with a standard deviation of 0.0005.