Solving Challenges in Nuclear Data for the Safety of European Nuclear Facilities CHANDA

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1 PROJECT PRESENTATION (PP) Solving Challenges in Nuclear Data for the Safety of European Nuclear Facilities CHANDA Contract (grant agreement) number: FP7-Fission Author(s): Enrique M. Gonzalez Date of edit of this report: April 2014

2 A NEW ERA FOR NUCLEAR DATA The CHANDA project brings together the majority of the European nuclear data community, infrastructures and resources to prepare the methodologies, detectors, facilities, interpretation and tools to produce and use nuclear data with the quality required to comply with the needs for the safety standards that are mandatory for present and future European nuclear reactors and other installations using radioactive materials. Significant technical, methodological and organizational challenges have previously prevented the achievement of this goal for a number of relevant isotopes and nuclear reactions and CHANDA will focus its effort on overcoming those challenges. CHANDA includes 35 partners from 16 countries from EU plus Switzerland and Norway and 17 of the most relevant facilities equipped to measure nuclear data. The project partners have been strongly involved in previous Euratom projects producing or using nuclear data and in international organizations dedicated to the compilation, validation and distribution of nuclear data (such as the OECD s Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA/OECD) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)) and include most of the participants in FP7 nuclear data projects: ANDES, EUFRAT and ERINDA. Access for all To help overcome present challenges CHANDA will enable European scientists to access its partners facilities, and to build and operate new facilities (NFS@GANIL and N_TOF Area_2@CERN) providing neutron fluxes that are orders of magnitude higher than those presently available. The project will develop new measurement detectors and methods; new evaluation and validation tools and will organize the community into appropriate networks, in particular for targets preparation, and will propose consortiums to better integrate these EU resources with the collaborative instruments setup for the Horizon 2020 programme and beyond. The project will cover the whole energy field for the needs of thermal and fast neutron reactors, as well as the high energy data (up to a few GeV) needed for the subcritical Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS). The tools will also take care of the preparation and utilization of more comprehensive uncertainties and correlation matrices for experimental and evaluated data. 2

3 Special attention will be taken to use research and the know-how developed in CHANDA for the education and training of young scientists and engineers. In addition the results will quickly and efficiently disseminated to the EU community of nuclear data users including through application in the MYRRHA project. Approximately EUR one million will be used to facilitate access to the existing facilities, for approximately 4000 hours of additional data acquisition via some 40 experiments. In addition, both new facilities, and N_TOF are expected to start commissioning in 2014 and to provide the first beam time for measurements before the end of the project. An improvement on the nominal flux of a factor 20 to 100 is expected for these new facilities compared to the most intense sources available today. New methodologies The new methodologies will address most of the challenging data needs including: fission and capture cross sections for very radioactive and rare isotopes, detector setups for more complete characterization of elastic, inelastic and (n, xn) reactions, high efficiency and accurate decay data and fission yield measurements. These new methods, with the new evaluation, uncertainties and validation tools, should be available by the middle of the project and will be demonstrated. Particular attention will be taken for the application of the tools and new data for the safety analysis and design optimization of the MYRRHA prototype ADS and Generation IV reactor. During the first year of the project a new network coordinating target preparation and characterization will be setup, initially with EU partners but with the ambition to become global. The analysis of EU available capabilities and weakness in this field will orient the use of specifically reserved resources to improve the EU target preparation laboratories and to demonstrate their performance for specific samples relevant to other parts of CHANDA. Effective organization CHANDA will also work to elaborate the most efficient long term organization for nuclear data R&D. The possibility to integrate in the EERA and other organizational HORIZON 2020 frameworks and the feasibility to prepare for new instruments that coordinate national and EU nuclear data R&D will be studied. The objective will be to have a sustainable and comprehensive nuclear data R&D organization by the end of the project. The final contribution of CHANDA will be to provide more reliable and predictive nuclear data for already identified needs and the tools to improve the quality and predictability for other data as the need is identified in the future. The improved prediction capabilities will allow better estimations for the safety limits of present and future nuclear installations in normal operation and also in very low probability accident conditions. This best estimate modelling of facilities is one of the main trends for improving the overall safety of nuclear power and requires reliable data. Furthermore, the improved prediction capabilities will also allow optimization of the performance of existing nuclear installations, optimizing the designs for new reactor concepts, optimizing the number of demonstration facilities and experimental campaigns before new components or concepts can be safely deployed by the nuclear industry. 3

4 Data sharing In addition, by sharing the data with other fields like medicine and ecology, CHANDA will contribute to improving the quality of health, for example in radiotherapy, and in environment protection. Sharing data with fundamental nuclear and nuclear astrophysics R&D will also allow better understanding of the fundamental laws of nature and how the universe evolved. The continuous dissemination of nuclear data will be achieved through direct participation of CHANDA partners in relevant IAEA and NEA committees and participation in the principle international conferences and workshops related to the preparation or utilization of nuclear data. CHANDA will also organize two international schools: EXTEND (European course on EXperiment, Theory and Evaluation of Nuclear Data) and one of the Nuclear Resonance Analysis schools, with special attention to promote and train young scientists in nuclear data R&D and to inform participants of significant progress achieved by CHANDA. Information Coordinator Enrique M. Gonzalez-Romero Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT) Nuclear Fission Division Avenida Complutense, Madrid Spain Tel: Fax: enrique.gonzalez@ciemat.es (under construction) (temporary) Project details Project type: CP-CSA (Collaborative project - Coordination and Support Action) Project start date: 1/12/2013 Duration: 48 months Total budget: EUR EC contribution: EUR EC project officer: Roger Garbil European Commission Directorate-General for Research & Innovation Directorate G Energy Unit G.4 Fission CDMA 01/055 B-1049 Brussels Belgium roger.garbil@ec.europa.eu 4

5 Partners: Ansaldo Nucleare Spa, IT United Kingdon Atomic Energy Authority, UK Commissariat à l Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, FR European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), CH Centre de la Recherche Scientifique, FR Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, ES Agenzia Nazionale per le Nuove Tecnologie, l Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile, IT Grand Accelerateur National d Ions Lourds (GANIL), FR Helmolts-Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf ev, DE Institutul National de Cercetare Dezvoltare Pentru Fizica si Inginerie Nucleara Horia Hu, RO Instituto Nazionale de Fisica Nucleare, IT Associacao do Instituto Superior Tecnico para a Investigacao e Desenvolvimento, PT JRC Joint Research Centre European Commission, BE Institut Jozef Stefan, SI Jyvaskylan Yliopisto, FI Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia Energiatudomanyi Kutatokozpont, HU National Nuclear laboratory Ltd., UK Nuclear Physics Institute of the ASCR VVI, CZ NPL Management Ltd., UK Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group, NL National Technical University of Athens, EL Paul Scherrer Institut, CH Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, DE Studiecentrum voor Lernenergie, BE Technische Universitaet Wien, AT Universitatea din Bucuresti, RO Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitaet Frankfurt am Main, DE Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz, DE The University of Manchester, UK Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, ES Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, ES Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, ES Uppsala Universitet, SE Universitettet i Oslo, NO 5