Validation of criticality safety calculational methods for U-AVLIS plant project

The objectives of the Uranium Atomic Vapor Laser isotope Separation (U-AVLIS) are to develop, demonstrate, and deploy a laser-based process to enrich natural uranium in the U-235 isotope to levels useful as fuel in commercial light-water power reactors. Current U-AVLIS production plant criteria call for uranium product enriched in 235U up to 5 wt%. Development of the U-AVLIS technology is in an advanced stage, and demonstration of the integrated enrichment process is currently in progress using plant-scale equipment in the Uranium Demonstration System (UDS) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In this paper several existing experimental data which are applicable to the critical systems of importance to the safe design of the U-AVLIS plant are identified. These were used to benchmark a configuration-controlled, work station based version of one state-of-the-art computer code employed by the U-AVLIS program in UDS equipment design, and in U-AVLIS plant conceptual design NCS analyses