Delayed neutrons from high energy fission-spallation reactions

摘要

The next generation spallation neutron sources, neutrino factories or RIB production facilities currently being designed and constructed world wide will increase the average proton beam power on target by a few orders of magnitude. Increased proton beam power results in target thermal hydraulic issues leading to new target designs, very often based on liquid metal technologies such as Hg, Pb, or PbBi. Radioactive nuclides produced in liquid metal targets are transported into hot cells, into pumps or close to electronics with radiation sensitive components. Besides the considerable amount of photon activity in the irradiated liquid metal, a significant amount of the Delayed Neutron (DN) precursor activity can be accumulated in the target fluid. The transit time from the front of a liquid metal target into areas, where DNs may be important, can be as short as a few seconds, i.e. well within one half-life of many DN precursors. Therefore, it seems very important to evaluate the DN flux as a function of position and determine if DNs may contribute significantly to the activation and dose rates. The multi-particle transport code MCNPX combined with the material evolution program CINDER'90 is used to predict the DN precursors and construct the DN tables. These DN tables are employed within the generalized geometrical model of the MegaPie spallation target at PSI (Switzerland). We show that the contribution of DNs and prompt spallation neutrons to the total neutron flux is comparable at the very top of the liquid PbBi loop. We also demonstrate that these estimates of DNs within MCNPX are very much model-dependent. No experimental data are available for DN yields and time spectra from high energy fission-spallation reactions. An experiment to perform these measurements is proposed.