(n,xnγ) cross sections on actinides versus reaction code calculations

¹ Université de Strasbourg, CNRS, IPHC UMR 7178, Strasbourg, France
² Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest-Magurele, Romania
³ IAEA Nuclear Data Section, Vienna, Austria
⁴ CEA, DAM, DIF, Arpajon, France
⁵ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
⁶ European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Geel, Belgium

^a e-mail: maelle.kerveno@iphc.cnrs.fr

Published online: 13 September 2017

Abstract

The experimental setup GRAPhEME (GeRmanium array for Actinides PrEcise MEasurements) has been used at GELINA (EC-JRC, Geel, Belgium) to perform (n,xn γ) cross sections measurements. GRAPhEME has been especially designed to take into account the specific difficulties generated by the use of actinides samples. This work takes place in the context of new nuclear data measurements for nuclear reactor applications. Considering the very tight accuracy requested for new experimental data, special care has been paid to quantify as accurately as possible all the uncertainties from the instruments and the analysis procedure. From the precise (n,xn γ) cross sections produced with GRAPhEME, the use of model calculations is required to obtain (n,xn) cross sections. Beyond the measurements, extensive work on theoretical models is necessary to achieve a better evaluation of the (n,xn) processes. In this paper, we will discuss the final step of the ²³⁸U data analysis and present some recent results obtained on ²³²Th compared to TALYS modellings. A new measurement campaign on ²³³U has started recently, a first assessment of the recorded data will be presented.