TOWARDS THE VALIDATION OF NOISE EXPERIMENTS IN THE CROCUS REACTOR USING THE TRIPOLI-4 MONTE CARLO CODE IN ANALOG MODE

¹ Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviour (LRS) Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
² DEN-Service d’Etudes des R´eacteurs et de Mathématiques Appliquées (SERMA), CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
³ Nuclear Energy and Safety Division (NES) Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland

oskari.pakari@epfl.ch
vincent.lamirand@epfl.ch

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

Intrinsic neutron noise experiments offer a non-invasive manner to measure the prompt decay constant or reactivity of fissile systems. Using the fluctuations in the density of fission chains, one can infer the kinetics parameters via correlation analysis such as the Rossi-alpha method. The models allowing for the interpretation of these measurements typically rely on the assumption of the system behaving according to point kinetics. When dealing with systems where point kinetics fail to predict the true time correlation – such as heterogeneous or large cores – the direct simulation of fission chains using Monte Carlo methods appears as the only reliable candidate to provide reference predictions for the correlation functions. Monte Carlo methods using explicit fission model libraries are thus being examined as tools for prediction in noise analysis. In this work we illustrate the developments and simulation results of the analog transport capabilities of the TRIPOLI-4 Monte Carlo code coupled with the LLNL fission library FREYA, as applied to a set of neutron noise experiments carried out in the CROCUS zero-power reactor with emphasis on the identification of spatial effects. To validate the general capability of the code to predict noise correlations, we examine time distributions of the whole core fission and explicit detection reactions. We present the methodology to achieve a good agreement between experiments and simulations. We reproduced experimental results for relative α, within typical biases, and conclude on the general feasibility of the analog method. We further explore a decoupled core model and analyze it using the noise method. The results indicate an effective method to treat decoupled systems.