Improvement on the calculation of D2O moderated critical systems with new thermal neutron scattering libraries

Abstract

To improve the evaluations in thermal sublibraries, we developed a set of thermal neutron scattering cross sections (scattering kernels) for the deuterium and oxygen bound in heavy water in the ENDF-6 format. These new libraries are based on molecular dynamics simulations and recent experimental data, and result in an improvement of the calculation of single neutron scattering quantities. In this work, we show how the use of this new set of cross sections also improves the calculation of thermal critical systems moderated and/or reflected with heavy water. The use of the new thermal scattering library for heavy water, combined with the ROSFOND-2010 evaluation of the deuterium cross sections, results in an improvement of the C/E ratio in 48 out of 65 benchmark cases calculated with the Monte Carlo code MCNP5, in comparison with the existing library based on the ENDF/B-VII evaluation.