Benchmarks of depletion and decay heat calculation between MENDEL and MARBLE

Yokoyama, Kenji   ; Lahaye, S.*

CEA/DEN/DM2S/SERMA and JAEA/NSEC are working on benchmarks for burnup, isotopic concentrations and decay heat calculations in the collaboration framework between both organisms. Both actors of this benchmark are independently developing their own simulation code systems for computing quantities of interest in nuclear fuel cycle domain: MENDEL in CEA and MARBLE in JAEA. The purpose of the benchmark is to verify each system by comparing both calculation results on specific applications. MENDEL uses a several solvers for the resolution of Bateman equation. Runge-Kutta method or Chebyshev Rational Approximation method (CRAM) are used for irradiation computations. An analytical solver can also be used for decay calculations. MARBLE can use Krylov subspace method or CRAM method. As the first phase of the benchmark, we compared the calculated results of decay heat and isotropic concentrations following by a Pu-239 fast fission pulse. We applied nuclear data from three libraries: (1) JEFF-3.1.1, (2) JENDL/DDF-2015 + JENDL/FPY-2011, and (3) ENDF/B-VII.1. Nuclear data and burnup chain were generated from these libraries independently on each system. We confirmed that the results for both systems were in very good agreement with each other. Numerical results were also compared to experimental data. As the second phase of the benchmark, we are proceeding with a burnup calculation benchmark of MENDEL and MARBLE using the nuclear data and burnup chain provided by ORLIBJ33, which is a set of cross-section data based on JENDL-3.3 for ORIGEN-2 code system. We will also compare with calculation results by the ORIGEN-2 code with ORLIBJ33. Since the series of ORLIB, that is, ORLIBJ32, ORLIBJ33, and ORLIBJ40, have been widely used especially in Japan for many years, the comparison with ORLIB is effective for confirming the performance of MENDEL and MARBLE.