Impact of the fission yield nuclear data uncertainties in the pin-cell burn-up OECD/NEA UAM Benchmark

The prediction of fission products and the impact of their uncertainties to different safety-related spent fuel applications (burn-up credit, decay heat generation, radiological safety, waste management, burn-up prediction) are required for the evaluation of spent fuel system designs and safety analysis options. One of the nuclear data needs to this prediction is the independent fission yields. The mostly used general-purpose evaluated nuclear data libraries provide these data including their uncertainties as standard deviation, with no-correlation between fission yields. However, new developments in the theory and measurements of fission product yields are expected to result in new evaluated files in the next coming years. These files will include considerably more accurate yields including neutron energy dependence combined with new covariance information allowing realistic uncertainty estimates. In this paper, we focused on the effect of fission yield covariance information on criticality and depletion calculations. A LWR pin-cell burn-up benchmark, proposed in the general framework of the OECD/UAM Benchmark is analyzed to address the impact of independent fission yield uncertainties. Calculations were performed with the SCALE6 system and the ENDF/B-VII.1 fission yield data library, adding covariance data obtained from including covariance info of mass yields. Results are compared with those obtained with the uncertainty data currently provided by ENDF/B-VII.1. The uncertainty quantification is performed with a Monte Carlo sampling and then compared with linear perturbation. (author)