Code adequacy assessment, TRAC-PF1/MOD3

The purpose of the new production reactors (NPR) program is to plan, design, and construct safe and environmentally acceptable new reactor capacity necessary for an assured supply of nuclear materials. Los Alamos National Laboratory's mission in the NPR program is to support the NPR's Office of Safety and Quality in assuring that US Department of Energy safety objectives have been achieved by conducting independent safety assessments of the design. This requires a sound understanding of the important physical phenomena that may occur during transients in the reactor. In practice, conducting an independent safety assessment requires the ability to understand and describe the behavior of the plant systems for the range of transients from normal operation to postulated accidents, including design-basis events that will be discussed in the accident analysis chapter of the integrated safety analysis report. Analytical tools (computer codes) are the principal products used to understand and predict plant response during accidents. It is important to determine code adequacy for this intended safety assessment usage. This paper describes a code review conducted to determine the adequacy of the TRAC-PF1/MOD3 code for confirmatory analyses of NPR heavy water reactor (HWR) accident analyses.