Assessment of TRACE 4.160 and 5.0 against RCP Trip Transient in Almaraz I Nuclear Power Plant (NUREG/IA-0233)

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Publication Information

Manuscript Completed: June 2008
Date Published: July 2010

Prepared by:
César Queral¹, Antonio Expósito¹, Gonzalo Jiménez¹, Laura Valle¹ and Juan Carlos Martínez-Murillo²

¹Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Alenza 4. 28003 Madrid
Spain

²Almaraz-Trillo AIE
Avenida de Manoteras 46 Bis. 28050 Madrid
Spain

A. Calvo, NRC Project Manager

Prepared as part of:
The Agreement on Research Participation and Technical Exchange
Under the Thermal-Hydraulic Code Applications and Maintenance Program (CAMP)

Prepared for:
Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Washington, DC 20555-0001

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Abstract

The Energy Systems Department of Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid has developed a model of Almaraz NPP, Westinghouse three loops PWR design, for TRACE code in the framework of several projects sponsored by the Spanish Nuclear Regulatory Commission (CSN) and the Electric Energy Industry of Spain (UNESA). At present, a full power and a shutdown model are applied for sequences analysis. The model has been adjusted at several power rates and steady state results show good agreement with plant data. In order to check the whole model, a wide spectrum of transient simulations were performed, observing a good behavior. For partial fulfilment of the bilateral - agreement for cooperation in thermalhydraulic activities between the Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear of Spain (CSN) and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US-NRC), the simulation of single RCP trip transient that took place in Almaraz NPP on May 13 (2002) has been performed, comparing the results obtained with plant data. The data comparison was quite encouraging when TRACE version 4.160 is used. However, the results obtained using TRACE 5.0 were not satisfactory. Wrong predictions were obtained for the steam flow through the Steam Dump valves during the transient. Regardless of this problem, the work made allowed performing the first validation transient with the plant model. The simulations have been run in a Pentium IV 3.4 MHz under Windows XP and AMD Opteron Dual Core Processors 180 & 1222 under Debian Linux, both with 32 and 64 bits executables. This work has been sponsored by UNESA and Almaraz-Trillo AIE.