LVR-15 is a light-water-tank-type research reactor placed in a stainless-steel vessel under a shielding cover located in the Research Centre Rez (CVR) near Prague. It is operated at a steady-state power of up to 10 MWt under atmospheric pressure and is cooled by forced circulation. In 2011, the fuel was replaced, going from high-enriched uranium (HEU) to low-enriched uranium (LEU). After 2017, the State Office for Nuclear Safety (SUJB) asked CVR to evaluate the LVR-15 under Design Extended Conditions B (DEC-B). For this reason, a new model was developed in the MELCOR code, which allows for modelling the progression of a severe accident (SA) in light-water nuclear power plants and estimating the behaviour of the reactor under SA conditions. The model was built by collecting information about the LVR-15. Since the research reactor can have different core configurations according to the location of the core components, the core configuration with the most fuel (hottest campaign K221) was selected. Then, to create the radial nodalisation, the details of the core components were obtained and grouped in five radial rings and 27 axial levels. The simulation was run with the boundary conditions collected from campaign K221, and the results were compared with the reference values of the campaign with a negligible percentage of error. For the coolant inlet and outlet temperature, the reference values were 318.18 K and 323.5 K, respectively, while for the simulation, the steady state reached 319 K for the inlet temperature and 324 K for the outlet temperature. Additionally, the cladding temperature of the hottest assembly was compared with the reference value (353.72 K) and the steady-state simulation results (362 K). In future work, different transients leading to severe accidents will be simulated. When simulating the LVR-15 reactor with MELCOR, specific attention is required for the aluminium-cladded fuel assemblies, as the model requires some assumptions to cope with the phenomenological limitations.

This paper focuses on the TRACE code assessment for helium-cooled systems thermal-hydraulic analysis. In the frame of the GoFastR (gas cooled fast reactor) European Collaborative Project, ENEA has offered some selected experimental data for the organization of a benchmark exercise aimed at the validation of the system and CFD codes for the gas reactor transient analyses. One of the Research Center Řež teams participated in it with a CFD code application. Now, the experimental data are used in order to assess the TRACE code for the ongoing high-temperature helium loop (HTHL-2) licensing process. The results of the TRACE calculations agreed very well with the experimental measurements (often within the experimental uncertainties) data provided by the He-FUS3 facility, indicating that the code, despite developed for water coolant applications, if an appropriately tuned input is adopted, it can also be suitable for reasonably accurate gas technology thermo-hydraulic simulations.

As the global energy demand continues to grow and the pursuit of clean and sustainable resources intensifies, nuclear energy stands out as a secure, reliable, and low-emission solution. The complexity of nuclear power plant behavior under various operating conditions necessitates advanced simulation tools capable of capturing the interplay between multiple physical phenomena. Among these, multi-physics coupling, particularly between neutronics and thermal hydraulics, is a well-established approach for accurately modeling transient scenarios with strong feedback effects. In this context, PARCS and TRACE codes, developed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are widely used for coupled neutronic/thermal-hydraulic analyses and can be operated via the SNAP graphical interface. However, the current version of SNAP does not support automatic coupling for hexagonal core geometries, such as those found in VVER-type reactors. To address this limitation, a dedicated tool was developed to facilitate the coupling process between PARCS and TRACE for hexagonal cores. The proposed methodology was tested through the simulation of a rod ejection accident in a VVER-1000 reactor, demonstrating the validity of the methodology and confirming that the multi-physics approach provides more accurate, best-estimate results.

Energy Well (EW) is a concept of a small modular reactor, designed as a source of energy for places with low infrastructure. Its design combines TRISO fuel particles, graphite moderator and molten salt coolant. One of key features is that the active core is small and therefore easy to transport. Residual heat estimation of EW fuel assembly is conducted using two different computation codes, SCALE and SERPENT. The obtained residual heat power is then used as an input in TRACE model of the EW to obtain the development of residual temperature in the coolant in the core inlet and outlet and also maximum temperature on the outer side of a fuel slab. The resulting temperatures are below the operational temperature.