TY - GEN
T1 - Reactivity measurement of the lead fast subcritical VENUS-F reactor using beam interruption experiments
AU - Chevret, Thibault
AU - Lecouey, Jean-Luc
AU - Marie, Nathalie
AU - Lecolley, François-René
AU - Lehaut, Grégory
AU - Ban, Gilles M.
AU - Billebaud, Annick
AU - Chabod, Sébastien
AU - Doligez, Xavier
AU - Kochetkov, Anatoly
AU - Baeten, Peter
AU - Uyttenhove, Wim
AU - Vittiglio, Guido
AU - Wagemans, Jan
AU - Mellier, Frédéric
AU - Bécares, Vicente
AU - Villamarín, David
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the 6th and 7th Framework Programs of the European Commission (EURATOM) through the EUROTRANS-IP contract # FI6W-CT-2005-516520 and FREYA contract # 269665, and the French PACEN and NEEDS programs of CNRS. The authors want to thank the VENUS reactor and GENEPI-3C accelerator technical teams for their help and support during experiments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Westinghouse Electric Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2014/9
Y1 - 2014/9
N2 - In order to incinerate minor actinides and thus to reduce the issues linked to nuclear waste management, Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) are being under study. An ADS consists in the coupling of a particle accelerator with a sub-critical fast reactor. The on-line reactivity monitoring is a serious issue regarding safety, therefore several methods to estimate the reactivity of such sub-critical systems have to be investigated. Here, we present one method based on the study of the neutron population evolution during beam interruption experiments carried out in the framework of the FREYA FP7 program [1,2] at the GUINEVERE facility, which couples the fast lead sub-critical reactor VENUS-F with the deuteron accelerator GENEPI-3C at SCK-CEN in Mol, Belgium. After describing the facility, the analysis based on point kinetics theory and preliminary results of the reactivity measurements will be presented. Then, spatial effects that are not taken into account by point kinetics theory will be highlighted using MCNP simulations, and correction factors to raw results will be calculated. In the end, final results will be compared to reference reactivity values obtained with the Modified Source Multiplication (MSM) method.
AB - In order to incinerate minor actinides and thus to reduce the issues linked to nuclear waste management, Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) are being under study. An ADS consists in the coupling of a particle accelerator with a sub-critical fast reactor. The on-line reactivity monitoring is a serious issue regarding safety, therefore several methods to estimate the reactivity of such sub-critical systems have to be investigated. Here, we present one method based on the study of the neutron population evolution during beam interruption experiments carried out in the framework of the FREYA FP7 program [1,2] at the GUINEVERE facility, which couples the fast lead sub-critical reactor VENUS-F with the deuteron accelerator GENEPI-3C at SCK-CEN in Mol, Belgium. After describing the facility, the analysis based on point kinetics theory and preliminary results of the reactivity measurements will be presented. Then, spatial effects that are not taken into account by point kinetics theory will be highlighted using MCNP simulations, and correction factors to raw results will be calculated. In the end, final results will be compared to reference reactivity values obtained with the Modified Source Multiplication (MSM) method.
KW - ADS experiments
KW - Monte-Carlo simulations
KW - Reactivity monitoring
KW - Sub-criticality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85071903580&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - In-proceedings paper
AN - SCOPUS:85071903580
BT - Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2014
T2 - 2014 - PHYSOR
Y2 - 28 September 2014 through 3 October 2014
ER -