Determination of the isotopic composition of neutron irradiated nuclear fuel materials by MCNPX

The aim of this study was to examine whether the MCNPX code can provide acceptable results in fuel depletion calculation. There sets of cross section libraries have been process with the NJOY code on the basis of three different cross section evaluations. These libraries had been validated and the statistical evaluation of the results showed that all three sets had been processed correctly and they are applicable for the burnup calculation. To verify the burnup capabilities of the MCNPX code the third case of the IV-B phase of the OECD NEA Burnup credit benchmark has been chosen, which is a code to code validation. The main task was to compare the k and the isotope concentrations at 4 burnup steps. The comparison of the calculation results clearly showed that the results obtained by MCNPX were in the range of other codes used in nuclear research. There were some discrepancies between the calculated and the benchmark data, but it was not possible to definitely conclude whether they were caused by the accuracy of the program or not. On the one hand, the results showed that some discrepancies may have been caused by the different cross section evaluations used in the calculation. On the other hand we cannot determine, how accurate the results from the other codes were; thus the deviations that at the first glance seemed to be high might not have necessarily meant inaccuracies in the calculation. Despite the fact that the MCNPX code is still in development, we can conclude that the code is capable of obtaining relevant results. (authors)