Study on the Sensitivity and Uncertainty of Nuclear Data to the Sodium-Cooled Linear Breed-and-Burn Fast Reactor Using SCALE6.2 Code

Abstract

Previously, the neutronics design of a small and compact linear breed-and-burn fast reactor (B&BR) was completed. The reactor produces 400 MWth power, and it can operate with excess reactivity of less than 1$ for more than 50 years without refuelling. As the blanket fuel, the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from existing light water reactors (LWRs) is used to reduce the burden from the problematic long-lived isotopes in SNF. However, by loading massive nuclides at the initial core, the impact of nuclear data uncertainty on the reactivity calculation results of SNF-fuelled B&BR at the beginning of life (BOL) is expected to be significant because these nuclides have different credentials in evaluated nuclear data libraries. In this study, the impact of nuclear library uncertainty from ENDF/B-VII.0 and ENDF/B-VII.1 on reactivity calculation of B&BR is evaluated using the continuous-energy TSUNAMI-3D module in the SCALE6.2 code package. The uncertainty of reactivity calculation results of B&BR caused by the inaccuracy of two libraries is significant (more than 2000 pcm), mainly from the uncertainty of 235,238U and 56Fe cross section. The energy-dependent sensitivity profiles show that they are significant at the fast energy range. The uncertainty of coolant void reactivity (CVR) is about 18%, and that of fuel temperature coefficient (FTC) is about 15% of the reactivity effect. The top five contributions for CVR accounted for elastic scattering of 238U, capture of 235,238U, and elastic scattering of 23Na and 56Fe. Meanwhile, the top contributors for FTC were accounted for elastic scattering of 238U and 56Fe, capture of 235U, and elastic scattering of 94Zr and 57Fe. It is highly recommended to improve the accuracy of those isotopes’ cross sections at the high energy range to provide a more reliable reactivity calculation for the fast system.