Neutron cross-sections above 20 MeV for design and modeling of accelerator driven systems

Abstract

One of the outstanding new developments in the field of partitioning and transmutation (P&T) concerns accelerator-driven systems (ADS) which consist of a combination of a high-power, high-energy accelerator, a spallation target for neutron production and a sub-critical reactor core. The development of the commercial critical reactors of today motivated a large effort on nuclear data up to about 20 MeV, and presently several million data points can be found in various data libraries. At higher energies, data are scarce or even non-existent. With the development of nuclear techniques based on neutrons at higher energies, nowadays there is a need also for higher-energy nuclear data. To provide alternative to this lack of data, a wide program on neutron-induced data related to ADS for P&T is running at the 20-180 MeV neutron beam facility at 'The Svedberg Laboratory' (TSL), Uppsala. The programme encompasses studies of elastic scattering, inelastic neutron production, i.e., (n, xn ) reactions, light-ion production, fission and production of heavy residues. Recent results are presented and future program of development is outlined.