The source jerk integral method for sub-critical measurements in ADS

A Kochetkov (1) , A. Billebaud (2) , Sébastien Chabod (2) , A Krása (1) , F.-R Lecolley (3) , J.-L Lecouey (3) , G. Lehaut (3) , N. Marie (3) , N. Messaoudi (1) , G. Vittiglio (1) , Jan Wagemans (1)

1 SCK-CEN - Centre d'Etude de l'Energie Nucléaire
2 LPSC - Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie
3 LPCC - Laboratoire de physique corpusculaire de Caen

Three sub-critical (SC) core configurations were investigated in the VENUS-F zero power reactor coupled with the GENEPI-3C accelerator. The SC10 and SC12 were a mock-up of a MYRRHA start-up core and SC11 represented a more complex MYRRHA core loaded with various types of in-pile-sections. The sub-criticality of 11 variants of these VENUS-F cores was changed in several steps from -6$ down to -30$ using the safety and control rods. Their sub-criticalities were determined with the Source Jerk Integral (SJI) method using 11 fission chambers located all over the reactor. For the data analysis, the 8-group delayed neutron parameters from the JEFF-3.1.2 evaluated nuclear data library were used. Reliability and reproducibility of the experimental results were tested by repeating the measurements, swapping the detectors and varying the accelerator beam intensity, thus changing the detector count rates and verifying the validity of the dead time corrections. The obtained results are compared with MCNP calculations.

Domains: Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Physics [physics]

A Kochetkov, A. Billebaud, Sébastien Chabod, A Krása, F.-R Lecolley, et al.. The source jerk integral method for sub-critical measurements in ADS. International Conference on Physics of Reactors 2020: Transition to a Scalable Nuclear Future (PHYSOR 2020), Mar 2020, Cambridge, United Kingdom. pp.08002, ⟨10.1051/epjconf/202124708002⟩. ⟨hal-03016365⟩