Reliability assessment of MVP-BURN and JENDL-4.0 related to nuclear transmutation of light platinum group elements

¹ Department of Nuclear Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1-N1-9 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan
² Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine, 916 Engineering Tower, Irvine, CA 92697-2575, USA
³ Laboratory for Advanced Nuclear Energy, Institute for Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1-N1-9 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan

^a e-mail: terashima.a.aa@m.titech.ac.jp

Published online: 13 September 2017

Abstract

The Aprés ORIENT research program, as a concept of advanced nuclear fuel cycle, was initiated in FY2011 aiming at creating stable, highly-valuable elements by nuclear transmutation from ↓ssion products. In order to simulate creation of such elements by (n, γ) reaction succeeded by β⁻ decay in reactors, a continuous-energy Monte Carlo burnup calculation code MVP-BURN was employed. Then, it is one of the most important tasks to con↓rm the reliability of MVP-BURN code and evaluated neutron cross section library. In this study, both an experiment of neutron activation analysis in TRIGA Mark I reactor at University of California, Irvine and the corresponding burnup calculation using MVP-BURN code were performed for validation of the simulation on transmutation of light platinum group elements. Especially, some neutron capture reactions such as ¹⁰²Ru(n, γ)¹⁰³Ru, ¹⁰⁴Ru(n, γ)¹⁰⁵Ru, and ¹⁰⁸Pd(n, γ)¹⁰⁹Pd were dealt with in this study. From a comparison between the calculation (C) and the experiment (E) about ¹⁰²Ru(n, γ)¹⁰³Ru, the deviation (C/E-1) was signi↓cantly large. Then, it is strongly suspected that not MVP-BURN code but the neutron capture cross section of ¹⁰²Ru belonging to JENDL-4.0 used in this simulation have made the big di↑erence as (C/E-1) >20%.