Validation of a Multi-Purpose Depletion Chain for Burnup Calculation through TRIPOLI-4 Calculations and IFP Perturbation Method

P. Archier (1) , S. Domanico (1) , Jm. Palau (1) , G. Truchet (1)

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

The current standard depletion chain used by the CEA, called CEA-V5, was validated to treat only LWRs in 2008. This single depletion chain must correctly model the global loss of reactivity for both LWRs and Fast Reactors for future APOLLO3 work on Generation III and IV reactors such as EPR and ASTRID projects milestones. In order to verify the loss of reactivity of the standard CEA-V5 chain, a reference chain with 885 Fission Products (FPs) has been defined and used with the French Monte Carlo code TRIPOLI-4 and its depletion module for comparisons with the standard CEA-V5 chain containing 126 FPs. Three test cases are modeled, a UOX PWR cell, a MOX PWR cell and a MOX SFR cell, to validate the standard chain against the reference one. Results obtained from TRIPOLI-4 can then be used to calculate a loss of reactivity for each case to verify that the standard chain takes into account the majority (ideally 99.9%) of the anti-reactivity of the reference chain. In addition, this loss of reactivity has been decomposed by isotope to rank the FPs by importance using the Iterated Fission Probability (IFP) method recently implemented in TRIPOLI-4.

Keywords: Burnup calculation; Depletion chain; Validation

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

P. Archier, S. Domanico, Jm. Palau, G. Truchet. Validation of a Multi-Purpose Depletion Chain for Burnup Calculation through TRIPOLI-4 Calculations and IFP Perturbation Method. PHYSOR 2016 - Unifying Theory and Experiments in the 21st Century, May 2016, Sun Valley, United States. ⟨hal-02442248⟩