ComparaUve analyses on nuclear charaderistics of water-cooled breeder cores

not registered; Sato, Wakaei*; not registered

ln order to compare the nuclear characteristics of water-cooled bleeder cores with that of LMFBR, MOX fuel cell models are established for boiling and non-boiling LWR, non-boiling HWR and sodium-cooled reactor. Frst, the comarison is made between the heterogeneous cell calculation results by SRAC and those by SLAROM. The results show some differences as for neutron energy spectrum, one-grouped cross section and conversion ratio due to the different grouped cross section library (both are based on JENDL-3.2, though) used for each code, however, the difference is acceptably small for grasping the basic characteristics of the above-mentioned cores. Second, using the SLAROM code, main core parameters such as mean neutron energy, ratio of fast neutron and -value, are analyzed. The comparison between the cores show that softened neutron spectrum by the scattering effect of hydrogen or heavy hydrogen increase the contribution of nuclear reaction (especially for neutron capture reaction rather than fission reaction) in lower energy region comparing with LMFBR. ln order to overcome the effect, tighter lattice than LMFBR is necessary for water-cooled cores to realize the breeding of fissile nuclides. Third, effects of Pu isotopic composition on the breeding ratio are evaluated using SRAC burnup calculation. From the results, it is confirmed that degraded Pu (larger ratio of Pu-240) show the larger breeding ratio. At last, sensitivity analyses are made for k-effective and main reaction ratios. As for k-effective, using a temporary covariance data of JENDL-3.2, uncertainty resulting from the cross sections' error is analyzed for a boiling LWR and a sodium-cooled reactor. The boiling LWR core shows larger sensitivity in lower energy region than the sodium-cooled reactor (especially for the energy region lower than 1kev), And, 18-group analysis that is considered acceptably good for LMFBR analysis, should not be enough for accurate sensitivity estimation of ...