Methods for thermal reactor lattice calculations

The American code HAMMER and the British code WIMS, for the analysis of thermal reactor lattices, have been investigated. The primary objective of this investigation was to identify the causes for the discrepancies that exist between the calculated and the experimentally determined reactivity of clean critical experiments. Three phases have been undertaken in the research: (a) Detailed comparison between the group cross-sections used by the codes; (b) Definition of the various approximations incorporated into the codes; (c) Comparison between the values of a variety of reaction rates calculated by the two codes. It was concluded that the main cause of discrepancy between calculations and experiments is due to data inaccuracies, while approximations introduced in solving the transport equation are of smaller importance