A Refined analysis on the power reactivity loss measurement in Monju

Taninaka, Hiroshi ; Takegoshi, Atsushi; Kishimoto, Yasufumi*; Mori, Tetsuya ; Usami, Shin 

The present paper describes the evaluation of the power reactivity loss data obtained in the Japanese prototype fast breeder reactor Monju. The most recent analysis on the power reactivity loss measurement (Takano, et al., 2008) is updated considering the following findings: (a) in-core temperature distribution effect, (b) crystalline binding effect, (c) logarithmic averaging of the fuel temperature, (d) localized fuel thermal elongation effect, (e) updated Japanese Evaluated Nuclear Data Library, JENDL-4.0, and (f) refined corrections on the measured value. The influences of the updates are quantitatively identified and the most precise and probable C/E value is derived together with a thorough uncertainty evaluation. As a result, it is revealed that the analysis overestimates the measurement by 4.6% for the measurement uncertainty of 2.0%. The discrepancy is reduced to as small as 1.1% when the core bowing effect is considered, which implies the importance of the core bowing effect in the calculation of the power reactivity loss.