Effect of new cross-section evaluations on criticality and neutron energy spectrum of a typical material test research reactor

Several new WIMSD libraries based on recent cross-section evaluations such as IAEA, ENDFB-VI, JENDL, and JEF have been made available by IAEA. These libraries were used for the computation of multiplication factor and energy spectrum for Pakistan Research Reactor-1 (PARR-1). Methodology was validated for benchmark problems made available by IAEA and comparison with reference results. The value of effective multiplication factors for all newly released libraries are 1.8-3.2% less than that of 1981 WIMSD library. The effect of various cross-section libraries on neutron energy spectrum was also studied. Differences of about -10% to 12.5% were found in thermal flux using the newly released libraries as compared with that obtained using 1981 WIMSD library. From the analysis, it was found that the main source of the difference is the cross-sections of hydrogen bound in water. When these cross-sections of hydrogen (bound in water) from new libraries were used along with all other data in 1981 WIMSD library, the keff obtained in this way has a difference of only 0.02-0.8% with that obtained from new libraries, while the flux spectrum agreed within 1% below 1 MeV with new libraries