Principle and Uncertainty Quantification of an Experiment Designed to Infer Actinide Neutron Capture Cross-Sections

An integral reactor physics experiment devoted to infer higher actinide (Am, Cm, Bk, Cf) neutron cross sections will take place in the US. This report presents the principle of the planned experiment as well as a first exercise aiming at quantifying the uncertainties related to the inferred quantities. It has been funded in part by the DOE Office of Science in the framework of the Recovery Act and has been given the name MANTRA for Measurement of Actinides Neutron TRAnsmutation. The principle is to irradiate different pure actinide samples in a test reactor like INL’s Advanced Test Reactor, and, after a given time, determine the amount of the different transmutation products. The precise characterization of the nuclide densities before and after neutron irradiation allows the energy integrated neutron cross-sections to be inferred since the relation between the two are the well-known neutron-induced transmutation equations. This approach has been used in the past and the principal novelty of this experiment is that the atom densities of the different transmutation products will be determined with the Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy (AMS) facility located at ANL. While AMS facilities traditionally have been limited to the assay of low-to-medium atomic mass materials, i.e., A 200. The detection limit of AMS being orders of magnitude lower than that of standard mass spectroscopy techniques, more transmutation products could be measured and, potentially, more cross-sections could be inferred from the irradiation of a single sample. Furthermore, measurements will be carried out at the INL using more standard methods in order to have another set of totally uncorrelated information.« less