ORIGEN Integration into MPACT
This report documents the work performed to meet the objectives of the RTM milestone on ORIGEN Integration into MPACT. The main objective of the milestone was to demonstrate the capability to perform depletion problems with MPACT where the point depletion calculation, which solves the nuclide transmutation equation with ORIGEN. While MPACT already has a depletion capability based on ORIGEN, it is desired to transition to using ORIGEN because ORIGEN has undergone far more validation and software quality assurance than the implementation in MPACT. The integration was completed by compiling and linking the two codes together at build-time. Within the TriBITS build structure used for VERA, the MPACT and SCALE code repositories are already present. An optional dependency was created between MPACT to SCALE. The API available within ORIGEN was modified slightly to be able to be used by MPACT and two new software classes were implemented in MPACT to call the necessary ORIGEN subroutines. To test the ORIGEN integration two benchmark problems were analyzed. The first being the spent fuel isotopics from the Takahama-3 PWR reactor. This involved comparisons to experimentally measured nuclide concentrations for select actinides and fission products, and comparisons to other numerical results. The benchmark defines a 1-D problem limiting most of the effects due to the accuracy of a multi-dimensional transport solver, and thus differences can be assumed to be more likely caused by the point depletion solver methodology and associated nuclear data. The other benchmark analyzed two problems from the reactor physics benchmarks for LWR next generation fuel. The two configurations simulated were a PWR UO 2 pin cell and PWR UO 2 assembly. For all the benchmark problems the results were generally in good agreement with the other numerical results which were computed by several codes, including MPACT with its original depletion implementation. Thus it is concluded that ORIGEN was successfully integrated into MPACT and is capable of providing reasonable results. An additional cursory analysis of the performance of the ORIGEN point depletion compared to native MPACT point depletion solver was also performed. In this analysis it was observed that ORIGEN, on average, needs about 0.28 to 0.30 seconds to perform the point depletion calculation. This is greater than the target performance of 0.1 seconds which means future work to investigate smaller depletion chains will be needed. The MPACT internal depletion solver completes the point depletion calculation in 0.02 seconds, so it may be used for routine analysis until the use of a simplified burnup chain and performance improvements are implemented. Other future work should focus on implementing the post-correction fix-up and quadratic depletion and computation of decay heat and gamma sources.