Estimation of a spent nuclear fuel (SNF) nuclide inventory is of great importance in the context of fuel cycle safety assessment, for fuel transport, storage and disposal applications, including burn-up credit (BUC) applications. Therefore, it is crucial to use codes that accurately estimate the SNF inventory.
International efforts have been ongoing for decades at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and beyond, undertaken by Expert Groups. Their work has contributed to increasing the confidence in estimations covering methods, assumptions, biases, and uncertainties.
Some issues remain to be discussed for a better understanding of total biases and uncertainties, such as contributions from nuclear data uncertainties. This present activity, undertaken under the auspices of the Working Party on Nuclear Criticality Safety (WPNCS), will continue this work, with a focus on the assessment of nuclear data uncertainties associated with an SNF inventory.
This current exercise focuses on a realistic case where experimental data are available, taken from the NEA SFCOMPO database. Experimental data sets in this collection have a dual purpose: (1) to serve as a basis for the initial Calculation-over-Experiment comparison of the participants’ fuel inventory calculations; and (2) to analyse and assess the share of nuclear data uncertainties in the total uncertainties.
As a result, this work will provide new elements to improve the accuracy of the biases and bias uncertainties for criticality calculations, taking into account SNF.
Co-ordinator: C. Carmouze, R. Ichou (France)
Monitor: G. Procop (United States)
NEA Secretariat: J.-F. Martin
WPNCS SG15 working area (password protected | reminder)
