VERA Enhancements for Cross Section Shielding and Geometry Capabilities

Abstract

Two tasks were undertaken in FY22 that focus on VERA enhancements. The first task involved improvements to the new cross section shielding capability that was added to VERA in FY21. This cell-based capability solves the slowing down problem for each pin cell using Dancoff factors calculated from the whole-core problem. The Dancoff factors are determined for each subgroup level for important sets of materials such as fuel rods, control rods, fuel rods loaded with gad, etc. The cross-section shielding is then performed for each cell using a 1D cylindrical collision probabilities (CP) calculation to obtain the equivalence cross sections required for the core transport calculations. The advantage of this method over the whole-core subgroup calculations is efficiency, since far fewer sweeps of the entire core are required.