SARAX: A new code for fast reactor analysis part II: Verification, validation and uncertainty quantification

Abstract

This paper introduces the verification and validation (V&V) work on the newly developed fast reactor code SARAX. The verifications were done based on numerical benchmark calculations and code-to-code comparisons with the Monte-Carlo code. The validation works were performed and compared with evaluated reactor physics experiments. In this paper, results from different calculation schemes are discussed, and the uncertainty from nuclear data is quantified. The results show that SARAX has good accuracy in modeling a sodium fast reactor regardless of the integration parameters, such as keff, or the distributed parameters like the sub-assembly power/reaction rate. The uncertainty quantification shows that, for a MOX-fueled SFR, the greatest uncertainty in contributed nuclear data is from the inelastic scattering cross section of U-238, which requires further improvement to reduce the uncertainty of keff.