Abstract
Using experimental data published in the International Handbook of Evaluated Reactor Physics Benchmark Experiments for the fresh cold core of the High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor, a comprehensive validation study has been carried out to assess the performance of the SCALE code system for analysis of High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR) configurations. This paper describes part of the results of this effort. The studies performed included criticality evaluations for the full core and for the annular cores realized during the fuel loading, as well as calculations and comparisons for excess reactivity, shutdown margin, control rod worths, temperature coefficient of reactivity, and reaction rate distributions. Comparisons of the SCALE results with both the experimental values and MCNP-calculated values are presented. The comparisons show that the SCALE calculated results, obtained with both multigroup and continuous energy cross sections, are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data. The agreement with the MCNP predictions is, in general, very good.