VALIDATING THE VESTA MONTE CARLO DEPLETION INTERFACE USING ARIANE CHEMICAL ASSAY DATA FOR PRESSURIZED WATER REACTOR APPLICATIONS

摘要

The validation of the first release of VESTA (a Monte Carlo depletion interface code that is currently under development at IRSN) has been initiated using the ARIANE chemical assay data from the SFCOMPO database. The Actinide Research In A Nuclear Element (ARIANE) program examined irradiated MOX (Mixed OXide) and LEU (Low Enriched Uranium) fuel samples in both commercial PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) and BWR (Boiling Water Reactors) power reactors. The chemical analysis of the studied fuel samples were performed at three independent laboratories, being ITU (Germany), SCK-CEN (Belgium) and PSI (Switzerland). The presented work is limited to 6 of the PWR fuel samples from this program (three MOX samples and three LEU samples). The relatively good agreement seen between the measurements from the ARIANE program and the values predicted by VESTA are very encouraging and are consistent with results obtained with other codes on the general tendencies in the results. This validation exercise has also revealed that a lot of effort is required in preparing these simulations due to the way the experimental results and irradiation conditions are given in the experimental reports. A lot of time could be saved in the validation process of depletion codes if this type of experimental data is transformed into a standardized format for benchmarking purposes.