Program - Brookhaven National Laboratory

Vasiliev, W. Wieselquist and H. Ferroukhi,”Stochastic Sampling Method with MCNPX for Nuclear Data
Uncertainty Propagation in Criticality Safety Application”, PHYSOR 2012, Knoxville, USA, April 15-20,
2012, American Nuclear Society (2012)
PR 135
Validation of Evaluated Nuclear Data Libraries for Calculation of Fast Reactors
T. Ivanova, E. Ivanov, W. Haeck, Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire.
Given that integral data plays a key role in the validation of neutronics simulations for safety assessment,
a collection of integral benchmarks is being created at IRSN. It includes measurements of Keff , reactivity
coefficients, βeff , reaction rates, power distributions and other reactor-type parameters for dozens of configurations
which originate mostly from the Handbook of the International Reactor Physics Experiment
Evaluation Project (IRPhEP Handbook). For fast reactor neutronics code validation, the benchmarks
are selected from independent facilities in a way to cover a range of plutonium enrichments, 240Pu contents,
core sizes and diluents. The collection includes ZEBRA-22, ZEBRA-23, ZEBRA-24, ZEBRA-25,
MZA, MZB, ZPR-6/7-12, ZPR-6/7-99, SNEAK-7A, SNEAK-7B, BFS-62.3a, Joyo and other fast benchmarks.
For the purpose of validation, it is important to ensure that the uncertainties for the benchmark
experiments are well evaluated and correlations between the uncertainties are well established. Previous
studies demonstrate that the experimental correlations may not be negligible in a validation study. The
correlations between the experimental uncertainties (also called experiment correlations) arise from the
use of the same fuel and structural materials, the same container tank or cladding, and common methods
for measurements and instrumentation. The efforts are being mounted at IRSN to identify, quantify
and document the experimental correlations for the selected fast benchmarks. JEFF-3.1, ENDF/B-VI.8,
ENDF/B-VII.0 and ENDF/B-VII.1 libraries will be validated against the above benchmarks computed
with MCNP. The validation study will be performed with and without the experimental correlations. The
full paper will describe the validation method. The validation results will be presented and analyzed in
order to understand how the advances in new libraries improve performance in integral validation reactortype
benchmark tests. The analysis will be supported by Keff sensitivities to nuclear data calculated with
SCALE TSUNAMI-3D sequence for some benchmarks.
Corresponding author: Ivanova Tatiana
PR 136
Testing of Neutron Data for Fe, Cr, Ni based on Integral Experiments
Vladimir Koscheev, Gennady Manturov, Mikhael Semenov, Anatoly Tsibouliya, Institute for Physics and
Power Engineering, Bondarenko Square 1, Obninsk 244033, Kaluga Region, Russia.
In this work the modern state of evaluated nuclear data for structure materials Fe, Cr, Ni is given based on
comparison of data from RUSFOND files and some others. Calculations of criticality parameter, spectral
indices and fission rates for a set of selected fast uranium and plutonium benchmark systems from ICS-
BEP Handbook are fulfilled and comparison with experimental data was made. All calculations were made
by Monte-Carlo codes using different nuclear data libraries for both ABBN 299-grouped and continuous
energy cross-sections. The data are compared to the results obtained using the previous group data set
ABBN-93 too.
Corresponding author: Genndy Manturov
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