Dynamic rod worth simulation study for a sodium-cooled TRU burner

This paper presents a preliminary dynamic rod worth simulation study for a TRU burner core mockup of the PGSFR (Korean Prototype Gen-IV Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor) named BFS-76-1A so as to establish a calculation methodology for evaluating the rod worth of the PGSFR. The simulation method was mainly based on a three-dimensional multi-group nodal diffusion transient code for fast reactors in which the rod drop simulation for the BFS-76-1A was performed and all the fuel assemblies were taken into account for the detector response calculation. Then the dynamic rod worths were inferred from the simulated detector responses using an inverse point kinetics model and compared against the simulated static worths. The results show good agreement between the simulated pseudo detector response and the calculated core power as well as between the simulated dynamic and static rod worths, and thus indicate that the dynamic rod worth simulation method developed in this work can be applied to the rod worth estimation and validation for the PGSFR.