EnggRoom

Since the beginning of the BWR technology development there was an important concern about nuclear-coupled stability. The first experimental BWRs weren’t big enough to present instability and the first commercial BWR were designed in way to avoid instability issues. However, after many years of exploitation, many of those power plants suffered fuel modifications and/or power upgrades.
After that, the first indications of stability problems came in the late 70’s and during the 80’s. Moreover, the actual trend of increasing the reactor power density and to rely on natural circulation for more extensive core cooling will have major repercussion for the stability of advanced BWR designs.
In prevision of the increasing importance of the instability matter inside the new BWR plant design this work pretend to find new tools of understanding and methods that will help to predict and avoid instability related shutdowns. For that purpose thermal hydraulics and neutronics simulation tools will be used to extract real plant data from a NPP model. And this data will be analyzed and used to predict the plant stability behavior.