The future of nuclear energy production requires improving the performance of systems and scenarios. Numerous studies are underway to optimize the operations of current generation reactors with respect to U-Pu and Th-U fuel cycles or develop new reactor concepts. Among these, the improvement of the evaluated nuclear databases used for the simulation of nuclear systems is a field of research involving experimental nuclear physics, theoretical description of nuclear reactions, structure of nuclei, and evaluation of nuclear data. In this context, the research activities of the Nuclear Data for Reactors (DNR) team are focused on improving the knowledge of (n,xn) reactions. Our research projects are mainly experimental and concern the development and use of detection systems for the precise measurement of (n, xn γ) cross sections.
These experimental projects are divided into three parts:
- The development of the GRAPhEME setup at the GELINA@EC-JRC-Geel facility (Belgium) for the measurement of effective cross sections (n, n’ γ) on actinides;
- The development of the DELCO instrument at the GELINA@EC-JRC-Geel facility (Belgium) for the measurement of conversion electrons from highly converted transitions in actinides;
- The participation in the construction of the NFS facility at GANIL-SPIRAL2-Caen (France) for the use of GRAPhEME in the case of the measurement of (n, 2n) and (n, 3n) cross sections.
Beyond the experimental aspects, we have developed strong collaborations with theorists and evaluators of the field in order to improve the theoretical description of the studied reactions and to optimize the evaluation chain.
Scientific coordinator: Maëlle KERVENO
