Fast-thermal coupled cores in ZPR revisited physical specificities and potentialities for ZEPHYR

P. Ros (1) , P. Leconte (1) , P. Blaise (1) , J. Di-Salvo (1)

1 CEA-DES (ex-DEN) - CEA-Direction des Energies (ex-Direction de l'Energie Nucléaire)

The development of fast reactor GEN-IV technology at an industrial scale would need a significant improvement of nuclear data and related uncertainties. For this purpose, fast/thermal coupled configurations performed in MINERVE during the 1970’s have been recently revisited. The encouraging results obtained have led to further optimizations in order to prepare experimental programs in the future ZEPHYR facility to be built in Cadarache. This paper describes the concept of fast/thermal coupled core and its use in the improvement of fast-spectrum nuclear data thanks to integral experiments. An optimized configuration is presented with several variations in order to widen the possibilities of measurement so as to separate reactivity effects due to absorption and scattering reactions.

Keywords: experimental mock-up; fast/thermal coupled core; spectral emphasis; spectral conversion; nuclear data

Domains: Physics [physics]; Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Physics [physics]; Nuclear Theory [nucl-th]

P. Ros, P. Leconte, P. Blaise, J. Di-Salvo. Fast-thermal coupled cores in ZPR revisited physical specificities and potentialities for ZEPHYR. PHYSOR 2016: The Physics of Reactors conference, May 2016, Sun Valley, United States. pp.ISBN: 978-0-89448-726-2. ⟨cea-02431821⟩