An analysis of cobalt irradiation in CANDU 6 reactor core

In CANDU reactors, one has the ability to replace the stainless steel adjuster rods with neutronically equivalent Co assemblies with a minimum impact on the power plant safety and efficiency. The 60 Co produced by 59 Co irradiation is used extensively in medicine and industry. The paper mainly describes some of the reactor physics and safety requirements that must be carried into practice for the Co adjuster rods. The computations related to the neutronically equivalence of the stainless steel adjusters with the Co adjuster assemblies, as well as the estimations of the activity and the heating of the irradiated cobalt rods are performed using the Monte Carlo codes MCNP5 and MONTEBURNS2.1. The 60 Co activity and heating evaluations are closely related to the neutronics computations and to the density evolution of cobalt isotopes during assumed in-core irradiation period. Unfortunately, the activities of these isotopes could not be evaluated directly using the burn-up capabilities of the MONTEBURNS code because of the lack of their neutron cross-section from the MCNP5 code library. Additional MCNP5 runs for all the cobalt assemblies have been done in order to compute the flux-spectrum, the 59 Co and the 60 Co radiative capture reaction rates in the adjusters. The 60m Co cross-section was estimated using the flux-spectrum and the ORIGEN2.1 code capabilities THERM and RES. These computational steps allowed the evaluation of the one-group cross-section for the radiative capture reactions of cobalt isotopes. The values obtained replaced the corresponding ones from the ORIGEN library, which have been estimated using the flux-spectrum specific to the fuel. The activity values are used to evaluate the dose at the surface of the device designed to transport the cobalt adjusters. (authors)