Comparison of Physics Characteristics of Pressurized Water Reactor Type Advanced Light Water Reactors

Advanced light-water reactor (LWR) systems with improved passive safety features that claim to meet Generation III + safety criteria are of growing interest worldwide in meeting future energy demand. As an effort to understand the basic differences in lattice and core physics aspects of such advanced LWRs, preliminary steady-state reactor physics analyses are carried out for some of the pressurized water reactor (PWR) type of advanced LWRs like Westinghouse AP-1000 and European/Evolutionary PWR EPR-1650. The reactor physics parameters such as neutron multiplication factors, core average neutron flux spectra, worth of control systems, various reactivity coefficients and effective delayed neutron fraction are calculated and compared with the Russian PWR design VVER-1000 reactor for a clean initial core configuration at hot operating conditions. A lattice burnup code, DRAGON and a Monte Carlo (MC) code are used for the purpose. The study not only highlights the differences in nuclear design and estimated core physics parameters of VVER-1000, AP-1000 and EPR-1650 reactors but also demonstrates the capability of advanced reactor physics computer codes available for safety evaluations of such reactor systems.