The NEA Working Party on Scientific Issues and Uncertainty Analysis of Reactor Systems (WPRS) held its annual Benchmarks Workshops on 22-26 May 2023 in Bologna, Italy which brought together 223 participants from 21 countries. The continuously increasing participation in this WPRS event demonstrates the growing interest in improvement and benchmarking of advanced reactor simulation tools to enable novel reactor designs and to optimise the operation of the existing fleet.
Hosted by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), these hybrid workshops addressed issues related to the state-of-the-art and validation of simulations of reactor core neutronics, reactor core thermal-hydraulics, fuel performance and multi-physics aspects of light water reactors (LWR), high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGR), sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFR), and lead-cooled fast reactors (LFR). Highlights of the event included the inauguration of the International School on Simulation of Nuclear Reactor Systems (SINUS), the kick-off of two new thermal-hydraulics benchmarks for LFR and HTGRs modelling, and the first in-person meeting of the WPRS Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
The next WPRS Benchmarks Workshops will be hosted by the Nuclear and Industrial Engineering (N.IN.E) company and will be organised in conjunction with the Best Estimate Plus Uncertainty (BEPU) conference in May 2024 in Lucca, Italy.
