RFSP Simulations of Darlington FINCH Refuelling Transient

Abstract

Immediately after refuelling of a channel, the fresh bundles are free of fission products. Xenon-135, the most notable of the saturating fission products, builds up to an equilibrium level in about 30 h. The channel power of the refuelled channel would therefore initially peak and then drop to a steady-state level. The RFSP code can track saturating-fission-product transients and power transients. The Fully INstrumented CHannels (FINCHs) in Darlington NGS provides channel power data on the refuelling power transients. In this paper; such data has been used to identify the physical evidence of the fission-product transient effect on channel power and to validate RFSP fission-product-driver calculation results.