Validation of SuperMC with BEAVRS benchmark at hot zero power condition

SuperMC is a general, intelligent, accurate and precise simulation software system for the nuclear design and safety evaluation of nuclear systems. In this study, the latest version of SuperMC has been validated by Benchmark for Evaluation and Validation of Reactor Simulations (BEAVRS), which is a full-core commercial Westinghouse PWR core, including two cycles of measured operational data. The benchmark is widely used in the validation of Monte Carlo codes, because it is an extremely detailed, relevant and large-scale 3D PWR model based on a real reactor. Firstly, the detailed BEAVRS model is built with the CAD-based hierarchical modeling function of SuperMC. Secondly, several calculations using SuperMC at hot zero power condition of cycle 1 are performed, and the comparison with the reference results and measured data show great agreement, including neutron effective multiplication factor, control rod bank worth, temperature coefficients, U-235 fission rates and relative power distribution. This study demonstrates the capability of SuperMC on 3D full-core high fidelity reactor simulation.