Effect of the New WIMSD Libraries on the Neutronic Parameters of the First and Equilibrium Cores of the Indonesian Multipurpose Research Reactor

Accurate neutronic parameters are very important in the design and safety analysis of a research reactor. The calculation method and neutron cross-section data play an important role to obtain those neutronic parameters. In this work, we reported our new results on the effects of the recent neutron cross-section data of the WIMSD libraries, JEFF-3.1 and ENDF/B-VII.0, on the criticality parameters of the first and equilibrium cores of the Indonesian multipurpose reactor, RSG-GAS reactor. WIMSD lattice code together with WIMSD libraries, coupled with the in- core fuel management code BATAN-FUEL, has been used routinely in the in-core management analysis since 1996. The objective of this work is to assess the accuracy of the recent WIMSD libraries before being adopted for routine in-core fuel management. As the first step, a series of core calculations were carried out for determining the effective multiplication factor, burn-up swing reactivity and Xenon equilibrium reactivity for the first and equilibrium cores. The results show that WIMSD library based on the evaluated nuclear data ENDF/B-VII.0 gives better agreement with the experimental results for criticality evaluation (underestimation of less than 0.4%). For burn-up swing evaluation, we found relatively large differences among the libraries (max. 5%). However, there is no significant difference among three WIMSD libraries in determining the Xenon equilibrium reactivity. (author)