Transmission measurements of hafnium for temperatures between 10 and 300 K

Although natural hafnium as a strong neutron absorber is already common in reactor engineering for a long time, boron carbide and AglnCd alloys were used mostly, as they are more efficient control rod materials. New interest in Hf arose in connection with proposals to increase the Pu content in MOX fuel and with plans to develop advanced nuclear reactors. By calculating the theoretical transmission for Hafnium using the code CALENDF, different results were obtained when using different evaluated data libraries. Obviously, some data libraries were not updated for a long time and important experimental work on Hf dates back to 1974. In order to resolve this situation, precise transmission TOF measurements for natural Hf samples were performed and compared to theoretical calculations.