Analysis of material buckling experiments performed in the masurca facility in support of the astrid sfr prototype core balance

Abstract : Sodium Fast Reactors (SFR) are the solution for long term development of nuclear energy production as it allows the use of the entire Uranium ore and enables to burn long live radioactive waste. Since the neutron balance of the core is badly known due to the lack of accuracy in evaluated nuclear data, the material buckling offers a way to improve that situation. Indeed the material buckling is experimentally accessible from the curvatures of the different fission rate traverses in cores built in the MASURCA critical facility. This analysis takes advantage of the use of recent deterministic codes with a detailed assessment of the experimental uncertainty. This uncertainty is significantly smaller than the one associated to nuclear data. Hence, this offers the opportunity of reducing nuclear data uncertainties when the experimental material buckling from different MASURCA cores such as 1A', 1B, R2 and Z2 will be analyzed. The prediction of the material balance of the ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) SFR core will then be significantly improved.