| The Transient Reactor Test Facility, or TREAT, is a test reactor designed for putting materials and fuels under extreme conditions that ran for almost 35 years until it was put on standby in 1994. After the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, there became a renewed awareness of the need for the accident testing for reactors. There were calls for TREAT to be brought back into operation. This would allow further accident testing of nuclear fuels and materials to restart. TREAT achieved its first criticality after 23 years on November 14, 2017. But something else has happened while TREAT was offline. Computers have gotten faster, and accurate simulations and models of reactor behavior has become financially and technologically viable. Using Serpent, a Monte Carlo reactor physics code developed at the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland, we can show that it is possible to accurately model transients for TREAT.
Key Words: Kinetics, Modeling, Monte Carlo, Serpent, Transients, TREAT |