Preliminary Designs for Criticality Safety Benchmarks—Iron/Steel/Chromium Series
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
The nuclear criticality safety community uses critical benchmarks extensively when analyzing nuclear systems. Having benchmarks sensitive to important materials of interest helps to ensure safety and constrain results. Critical benchmarks are also invaluable to the nuclear data community, which uses these benchmarks as a check and measure of quality of nuclear data libraries. Additionally, integral benchmarks are often used to validate the performance of computational tools for simulating nuclear systems. Many integral benchmarks have been documented in the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP) handbook, the International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project (IRPhEP) handbook, and the Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive Database (SINBAD). The National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC), operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the only general purpose critical experiments facility in the United States of America. NCERC regularly designs and executes critical experiments and other measurements useful to a wide variety of fields including nuclear criticality safety, commercial nuclear energy, nonproliferation, and nuclear data. NCERC has recently developed tools to visualize gaps and deficiencies in existing criticality benchmarks – this work is still ongoing. Through this work and other reviews, some high priority deficiencies have been identified. This paper aims to highlight three areas where additional critical benchmarks would be useful to the nuclear criticality safety community and various other groups. Additionally, NCERC is seeking feedback in regard to these proposed measurements to make sure they are as useful to as many communities as possible.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- 89233218CNA000001
- OSTI ID:
- 1914911
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-19-31543
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Journal Name: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 121; ISSN 0003-018X
- Publisher:
- American Nuclear Society
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
Collaborative International Evaluated Library Organization (CIELO)
Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP)
Integral Experiments
International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project (IRPhEP)
National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC)
Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive Database (SINBAD)