Verification of ATHLET against TRACE on Superphenix start-up tests

The thermal-hydraulics (TH) code ATHLET has been upgraded to be capable of sodium flow modeling. Its new extension is under verification and validation phase. The presented study aimed to demonstrate ATHLET capability in Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) transient predictions, through the comparison against TRACE TH code, this last being more established and tested for SFR applications. Calculations were performed on a set of start-up tests on Superphénix (SPX) SFR, and compared with TRACE results, which were used as a reference. It has been shown that given a specific set of reactivity coefficients, ATHLET and TRACE give consistent and close results.