Modeling Decay Heat with a Simplified Depletion Chain in OpenMC

TL;DR

This paper improves a simplified depletion chain used in OpenMC for decay heat modeling by adding pseudo-nuclides and delay nuclides, enhancing accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency.

Contribution

The authors introduce modifications to the CASL depletion chain, including pseudo-nuclides and delay nuclides, to better estimate decay heat without increasing computational complexity.

Findings

Adding pseudo-nuclides captures large nuclide groups effectively.

Delay nuclides significantly improve decay heat accuracy.

Modified chain maintains computational efficiency.

Abstract

OpenMC can be used to computationally model depletion and produce estimates of decay heat. As an input to depletion simulations, OpenMC requires a depletion chain that details nuclide transmutation pathways. The simplified CASL depletion chain was designed to track relatively few nuclides while still accurately modeling the effective neutron multiplication factor and nuclide number densities. However, the CASL chain dramatically underestimates decay heat due to the many nuclides it does not contain. In this work, we modify the CASL depletion chain to improve its accuracy while maintaining its computational efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of adding pseudo-nuclides to the CASL chain, with each pseudo-nuclide capturing the behavior of a large group of nuclides. We further introduce "delay nuclides," which dramatically improve the accuracy of decay heat estimates.