Validation of tungsten cross sections in the neutron energy region up to 100 keV

¹ Oak Ridge National Laboratory, PO Box 2008, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
² EC-JRC Geel, Belgium
³ Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, 92260 Fontenay-aux-Roses, France
⁴ International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Data Section, Austria

^a e-mail: pignimt@ornl.gov. Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains, the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

Published online: 13 September 2017

Abstract

Following a series of recent cross section evaluations on tungsten isotopes performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), this paper presents the validation work carried out to test the performance of the evaluated cross sections based on lead-slowing-down (LSD) benchmarks conducted in Grenoble. ORNL completed the resonance parameter evaluation of four tungsten isotopes – ^{182,183,184,186}W – in August 2014 and submitted it as an ENDF-compatible file to be part of the next release of the ENDF/B-VIII.0 nuclear data library. The evaluations were performed with support from the US Nuclear Criticality Safety Program in an effort to provide improved tungsten cross section and covariance data for criticality safety sensitivity analyses. The validation analysis based on the LSD benchmarks showed an improved agreement with the experimental response when the ORNL tungsten evaluations were included in the ENDF/B-VII.1 library. Comparison with the results obtained with the JEFF-3.2 nuclear data library are also discussed.