Designing Critical Experiments in Support of Full Burnup Credit
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Burnup credit is the process of accounting for the negative reactivity due to fuel burnup and generation of parasitic absorbers over fuel assembly lifetime. For years, the fresh fuel assumption was used as a simple bound in criticality work for used fuel storage and transportation. More recently, major actinides have been included. However, even this yields a highly conservative estimate in criticality calculations. Because of the numerous economical benefits including all available negative reactivity (i.e., full burnup credit) could provide, it is advantageous to work toward full burnup credit. Unfortunately, comparatively little work has been done to include non-major actinides and other fission products (FP) in burnup credit analyses due in part to insufficient experimental data for validation of codes and nuclear data. The Burnup Credit Criticality Experiment (BUCCX) at Sandia National Laboratory was a set of experiments with 103Rh that have relevance for burnup credit. This work uses TSUNAMI-3D to investigate and adjust a BUCCX model to match isotope-specific, energy-dependent keff sensitivity profiles to those of a representative high-capacity cask model (GBC-32) for each FP of interest. The isotopes considered are 149Sm, 143Nd, 103Rh, 133Cs, 155Gd, 152Sm, 99Tc, 145Nd, 153Eu, 147Sm, 109Ag, 95Mo, 150Sm, 101Ru, and 151Eu. The goal is to understand the biases and bias uncertainties inherent in nuclear data, and ultimately, to apply these in support of full burnup credit.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 948058
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Journal Name: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; ISSN TANSAO; ISSN 0003-018X
- Publisher:
- American Nuclear Society
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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