Application of Monte Carlo to PWR Cavity Radiation Streaming Calculation

The cavity streaming is the neutron beam from the reactor core through the tunnel, which is between the external surface of the pressure vessel and the shield inner surface. Reactor cavity streaming calculation is a typical deep penetration problem with complex geometry. The accurate calculation of neutron radiation streaming is a key problem to the reactor shielding calculation, for which the Monte Carlo method and the discrete ordinate method are two popular methods. The speed of discrete ordinate method calculation is fast, but it is hard to describe the complex pile of cavity; the Monte Carlo method can accurately describe the complex geometry, it has a high calculation precision, but with a low direct simulation efficiency. Based on a pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant, this paper presents a detailed model realized by Monte Carlo code, with continuous energy points cross section libraries. The neutron flux density distribution of PWR reactor cavity streaming can directly be calculated by a three-dimensional simulation. For such an actual deep penetration problem, a variety of variance reduction techniques are studied, an effective variance reduction technique is used to obtain results with small statistic errors for a Monte Carlo simulation, which effectively solves the problem of large-scale deep penetrating convergence difficulty, the cavity radiation streaming calculation and analysis are completed. The result shows that the Monte Carlo method can be used as a powerful tool to solve the problem of cavity streaming leakage.