Nuclear Materials and Energy (Oct 2022)
New evaluation of neutron-induced displacement damage cross section for EUROFER97
Abstract
Neutron irradiation damage is an important issue in fusion reactor applications. The present work evaluates the neutron-induced displacement damage cross section of the EUROFER97 reduced activation alloy based on the state-of-the-art neutron reaction data libraries JEFF-3.3 and ENDF/B-VIII.0. The issues related to nuclear data and their processing have been considered for evaluating reliable damage cross section for EUROFER97. In addition to the recently published improvements for EUROFER97 compositions, the JEFF-3.3-based damage cross section of 56Fe is significantly increased by treating the questionable recoil energy distributions for continuum inelastic neutron scattering. The final evaluation combines the revised JEFF-3.3 and ENDF/B-VIII.0 calculations and the KIT evaluation in 2015. The athermal recombination-corrected one is also calculated by using the above evaluation and the neutron energy-dependent efficiency deduced from the two KIT evaluations. The current evaluations are higher than the KIT evaluations by 8 % for a D-T fusion neutron and by 5–6 % for an ITER first wall neutron spectrum. The conversion factors from (fast) neutron fluences to DPA levels are included for simple applications.
