VERA Molten Salt Reactor Training Course: VERA-MSR

This course provides hands-on instruction on the integrated multiphysics modeling of liquid fuel molten salt reactors using the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) Molten Salt Reactor (VERA-MSR) tool.

Developed as part of the ten-year Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) mission to provide state-of-the-art software and methods for the U.S. commercial nuclear industry, VERA contains advanced capabilities for neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, fuel mechanics, and CRUD/chemistry for simulation of commercial PWRs. Many of the VERA tools are fully coupled for high-fidelity rod-wise local feedback and automated data transfer between tools, while a single simplified user interface provides a common data source for all the methods. As part of CASL's validation plan, VERA has been benchmarked against measured data from many operating reactors and experiments.

The VERA tools leverage existing capabilities in SCALE, including the use of multi-group cross section data processed with AMPX, isotopic depletion, decay, and activation with ORIGEN, and excore neutron transport capability provided by Shift with the same continuous-energy data used by KENO-VI.  Additional capabilities in VERA that are not available in SCALE are 3-dimensional (3-D) deterministic neutron transport with MPACT, two-phase sub-channel thermal-hydraulics with CTF (or COBRA-TF), and the BISON fuel rod performance code. In many cases, the capabilities developed by CASL have been verified against existing SCALE codes such as Polaris and KENO-VI.

VERA-MSR provides integrated multiphysics including neutronics for liquid fuel with associated delayed neutron precursor drift modeling, thermal and density feedback with associated Doppler broadening, material mass accountancy, and isotopic depletion. Although still in a prototype phase, VERA-MSR has been demonstrated for many MSR designs including fluorine-based salts in graphite channels (including the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment) and pool type systems with fast-spectrum chloride salts.

In VERA-MSR training, participants will join the first day of the VERA Users' Group Meeting (https://caslmeetings.ornl.gov/), which includes lectures on the key capabilities of VERA including MPACT, CTF, ORIGEN, BISON, MAMBA, Shift, and their multiphysics coupling as well as the VERAView data visualization tool, with an emphasis on validated PWR applications.

The second day will be hands-on training with VERA-MSR on a high-performance computing (HPC) platform.  Due to the computing requirements of VERA tools, seating for this training will be limited.

No prior knowledge of VERA or SCALE will be required. There is no registration fee for this course.