https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921107004
Integral data assimilation of the MERCI-1 experiment for the nuclear data associated with the PWR decay heat computation
1 CEA, DEN, DER Cadarache, F-13108 Saint Paul les Durance, France
2 EDF Research and Development, 7 Boulevard Gaspard Monge, Palaiseau, France
3 Aix Marseille Univ, Universite de Toulon, CNRS, IM2NP, Marseille, France
* Corresponding author: jordan.huyghe@cea.fr
Published online: 5 June 2019
Nuclear decay heat is a crucial issue for PWR in-core safety after reactor shutdown and back-end cycle. It is a dimensioning parameter for safety injection systems (SIS) to avoid a dewatering of the reactor core. The decay heat uncertainty needs to be controlled over the largest range of applications. The assimilation of the MERCI-1 experiment was studied to provide feedbacks on nuclear data. This experiment consisted in the measurement of the decay heat of a PWR UOX fuel sample irradiated in the OSIRIS reactor, for cooling times between 45 minutes and 42 days. More specifically, the consideration of several experimental values of MERCI-1 at different cooling times was tested. This raised issues about correlations to consider between different measurements. Besides, the impact of considering correlations between independent fission yields in covariance matrices on the decay heat uncertainty calculation and on the feedbacks on nuclear data is discussed.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
