IMPACT OF VARIOUS SOURCE OF COVARIANCE INFORMATION ON INTEGRAL PARAMETERS UNCERTAINTY DURING DEPLETION CALCULATIONS WITH CASMO-5

¹ Paul Scherrer Institut, Nukleare Energie und Sicherheit PSI Villigen 5232, Switzerland
² Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratory for Reactor Physics and Systems behaviour Lausanne 1015, Switzerland

corresponding author
mathieu.hursin@psi.ch
dimitri-alexandre.rochman@psi.ch
alexander.vasiliev@psi.ch
hakim.ferroukhi@psi.ch
andreas.pautz@psi.ch

Published online: 22 February 2021

Abstract

This paper describes the effect of input uncertainties on a set of integral parameters (kinf, nuclide compositions) associated with the validation of CASMO-5 against PIE data. The nuclear data under consideration are the cross-sections, fission spectrum and neutron multiplicities and fission yields. Various sources of covariance information are considered, novel ones (ENDFB-VIII.0, JEFF-3.3) as well as more widely distributed ones (JENDL-4.0, ENDF/B-VII.1, Scale 6.1 and Scale 6.2). All possible nuclide reaction pairs (cross sections, fission spectrum and averaged number of neutron per fission) have been perturbed, e.g. all isotopes available in both the respective covariance libraries and the CASMO-5 library. The evolution of the uncertainty estimates with exposure is complemented with sensitivity analysis to determine the main contributors to the uncertainty. The Pearson coefficient defined between the model output and a given input is used in this work to assess the part of the variance in the model output coming from the considered input uncertainty. It is a very promising measure of sensitivity as it is computationally cheap even though it assumes linearity of the output with respect to input perturbations. The evolution of the uncertainty with exposure, both in terms of trends and magnitude are however very different. Sensitivity analysis allows determining why the trends and magnitudes are different.