IRSN working program status on tools for evaluation of SFR cores static neutronics safety parameters

As technical support of the French Nuclear Safety Authority, IRSN will be in charge of safety assessment of any future project of Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR) that could be built in France. One of the main safety topics will deal with reactivity control. Since the design and safety assessment of the last two SFR plants in France (Phenix and Superphenix, more than thirty years ago), methods, codes and safety objectives have evolved. That is why a working program on core neutronic simulations has been launched in order to be able to evaluate accuracy of future core characteristics computations. The first step consists in getting experienced with the ERANOS well-known deterministic code used in the past for Phenix and Superphenix. Then Monte-Carlo codes have been tested to help in the interpretation of ERANOS results and to define what place this kind of codes can have in a new SFR safety demonstration. This experience is based on open benchmark computations. Different cases are chosen to cover a wide range of configurations. The paper shows, as an example, criticality results obtained with ERANOS, SCALE and MORET, and the first conclusions based on these results. In the future, this work will be extended tomore » other safety parameters such as sodium void and Doppler effects, kinetic parameters or flux distributions. (authors)« less