Control Rod Calibration and Worth Calculation for Optimized Power Reactor 1000 (OPR-1000) Using Core Simulator OPR1000

Abstract

Control rod is used to change the power in nuclear reactor. Certainly, the core at any moment can be made subcritical condition and shut downs when occurring to emergency instance in the core. The rod is grouped based on their function and located at different places in the core where their feature is maximized. Two methods of control rod calibration are the asymptotic period method and the rod-drop method, which were applied in this experiment. In the first method, the reactor is made supcritical by inserting the control rod to be calibrated a certain level. The rod drop method is to determine the subcritical; at the critical state, the rod to be calibrated is dropped into the core, and the resulting decay of neutron flux is observed and related to the reactivity. In this paper, the regulating rod will be calibrated according to the reactivity in OPR-1000 that corresponds to a certain control rod insert or withdraw, and the reactivity in power reactor depends on the integral and differential control rod group too. The core simulator OPR1000 is used to test those methods.