Benchmarking of G4STORK for the Coolant Void Reactivity of the Super Critical Water Reactor Design

Abstract

The objectives of this thesis were the validation of G4STORK to use it for the investigation of the SCWR lattice cell. MCNP6 was chosen as the program that the methodology of G4STORK would be validated against. Over multiple steps, the methodology of G4STORK was matched to that of MCNP6 (described here, 3.4). After each step, the output of the two programs were compared, allowing us to pinpoint why and where discrepancies came about. At the end of this process, we were able to show that when G4STORK used the same assumptions as MCNP6, it produced similar results (shown here, 4.1.4). The results of G4STORK simulating the SCWR lattice cell, using its more accurate default methodology, was then compared to those of MCNP6 (shown here, 4.2.1). Large differences in the results were seen to occur, because of the inaccurate assumptions used by MCNP6, during transient cases. We concluded that despite the existence of minor discrepancies between the results of MCNP and G4STORK for some cases, G4STORK is still the theoretically more accurate method for simulating lattice cell cases such as these, due to MCNP’s use of the generational method.