The effect of boron dilution transient on the VVER-1000 reactor core using MCNP and COBRA-EN codes

In this paper, the effect of boron dilution transient, as a consequence of the malfunction of the boron control system, was investigated in a VVER-1000 reactor, and then an appropriate setpoint was determined for the actuation of the emergency protection system to the reactor shutdown. In order to simulate the boron dilution, first, the whole reactor core was simulated by MCNPX code to compute the radial and axial power distribution. Then, the COBRA-EN code was employed using calculated power distribution for analyzing the thermal-hydraulic of hot fuel assembly and for extracting the safety parameters. For the safe operation of the reactor, certain parameters must be in defined specified ranges. Comparison between our results and FSARs data shows that the present modeling provides a good prediction of boron dilution transient with the maximum relative difference about 4%.