Avaliações de segurança do reator multipropósito brasileiro

Abstract

This work presents a model developed for thermal hydraulic (TH) simulation of the Multipurpose Brazilian Reactor (RMB), whose Brazilian proposal for design, construction and operation was established in 2007. This reactor has as main proposed the production of radioisotopes for use in exams of nuclear medicine, material tests and utilization of neutrons beams. Besides of the TH modeling and safety analysis of the reactor, the application of a methodology to perform coupled calculation thermal-hydraulic/neutron kinetic (TH/NK) is also presented. Initially, the RMB was modeled in the safety analysis RELAP5 code. This code performs the thermal hydraulic calculation using point kinetics. Subsequently, the model was adapted and verified to the RELAP5-3D© code. This code performs the process of internal coupling through the option of nodal neutron kinetics calculation using the NESTLE code which solves the neutron diffusion equation. To generate the neutronic group constants, which are macroscopic cross sections that serve as input data for the neutronic codes, it was used the WIMSD-5B cell calculation code. The neutron analysis code PARCS was also used to model the 3D RMB core in order to compare the results of radial and axial average power distribution with the results generated by RELAP5-3D© code and with the available results of the CITATION neutron kinetic code. The safety analyses demonstrated safe behavior of the reactor through situations of possible transients. The 3D coupled calculations to the steady state operation also showed expected behavior, as well as the RMB neutronic analyzes performed with the codes NESTLE and PARCS.