EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF THE FRENCH CRISTAL V1.0 PACKAGE

CRISTAL criticality safety package new version, CRISTALV 1.0, has been developed by the Institut de Radioprotection et de Surete Nucleaire and the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique, in collaboration with the COGEMA company, mainly to allow taking into account burn-up credit in criticality safety studies. Meanwhile, the validation database, which was made up of about 500 benchmarks for CRISTAL V0 package, was extended. CRISTAL includes two calculation routes, using nuclear data taken from the JEF2.2 library: a standard route based on multi-group cross-sections (APOLLO2 - MORET 4 or APOLLO2 Sn calculations) and a reference route using the pointwise data (TRIPOLI4 calculations). The CRISTAL V1.0 validation database is made up of 2132 critical experiments mainly taken from the OECD/ICSBEP Handbook or performed in French facilities. Most of them have already been investigated with the different CRISTAL routes. The first trends of the validation work point out that the calculation results are generally in good agreement with the benchmark keff and that the new calculation schemes improve the validation results.