Evaluation of large 3600 mwth sodium-cooled fast reactor oecd neutronic benchmarks

Within the activities of the Working Party on Scientific Issues of Reactor Systems (WPRS) of the OECD, an international collaboration is ongoing on the neutronic analyses of several Generation-IV Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) concepts. This paper summarizes the results obtained by participants from institutions of different countries (ANL, CEA, ENEA, HZDR, JAEA, CER, KIT, UIUC) for the large core numerical benchmarks. These results have been obtained using different calculation methods and analysis tools to estimate the core reactivity and isotopic composition evolution, neutronic feedbacks and power distribution. For the different core concepts analyzed, a satisfactory agreement was obtained between participants despite the different calculation schemes used. A good agreement was generally obtained when comparing compositions after burnup, the delayed neutron fraction, the Doppler coefficient, and the sodium void worth. However, some noticeable discrepancies between the k-effective values were observed and are explained in this paper. These are mostly due to the different neutronic libraries employed (JEFF3.1, ENDFB7.0 or JENDL-4.0) and to a lesser extent the calculations methods.