Abstract
New conditions on the occurrence of the criticality in Reaction Zone 9 (RZ9) of Oklo natural reactors (Gabon) are reported. Analytical expressions relating the effective neutron multiplication factor and the most influential parameters with respect to the fission chain reaction behaviour have been derived for two configurations of the reaction zone using the two-group diffusion theory. The dependence of the effective neutron multiplication factor on the thickness, the radius, the porosity and the uranium content of the reaction zone was investigated by means of the design of experiments method in order to establish a new set of limit values corresponding to critical configurations.The developed method is validated through the verification of the criticality occurrence with the new set of parameters of a reaction zone model close to the real RZ9 configuration using the analytical calculations of the effective neutron multiplication factor and simulation results of the continuous energy Monte Carlo code MCNP6.
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