Full-Scale ZR-6 and BFS-49/1A Critical Assemblies Calculations Using MNT-CUDA 3.0 Program

The article presents the results on MNT-CUDA 3.0 verification and validation on full-scale calculations of light-water ZR-6 and ZR-6M and fast-neutron BFS-49/1A critical assemblies. MNT-CUDA 3.0—a newly developed high-precision engineering code—is aimed at conducting neutron-physical core calculations of various types of nuclear reactors using the multi-group Monte Carlo method. The leverage of graphic processing units’ (GPUs) parallel processing capabilities significantly reduces calculation time. MNT-CUDA 3.0 has a flexible module architecture. Modules of multi-group libraries generation allow to conduct calculations using the data either prepared by the MCU precise code or from multi-group constants library of general purpose ABBN-RF. For full-scale calculations a preprocessor was developed allowing to build a system’s geometry from primitives created by user. It provides the opportunity to describe benchmark models of ZR-6 and BFS critical assemblies without using any significant simplifications. The comparison between multiplication factor calculation results and experimental ones are presented in the paper as well as the discrepancies in flux in every fuel rod, generation rates in every out of 65 energy groups, radial and axial flux distributions between MNT-CUDA calculation results and MCU and MCNP precise codes calculations.