Nuclear Power Reactors

Nuclear Reactors are now part of our daily need. This book intends to showcase how effectively the power can be calculated in hot channels and provide easy access to important information of reactor functionality. Many safety and design calculation codes are available. These can predict the important core parameters such as reactor power; thermal and fast flux distribution (depending on the type PWR BWR RBMK BREEDER etc.) at an assembly level with high accuracy. Most safety studies concerning reactor cores take into account the local acceptance criteria like the maximal local power density for example. To satisfy these criteria and to avoid huge safety margins it is necessary to know the detailed power distribution in the whole core the most accurately as possible. Solving the transport equation over a whole core is almost impossible because it is consuming too much of CPU time. Some methods were developed to reconstruct the power distribution from results of nodal diffusion codes. During the past years the system code ATHLET has been successfully coupled with the coarse mesh diffusion code QUABOX-CUBBOX both developed at GRS mbH Munich.