Uncertainty propagation analysis for PWR burnup pin-cell benchmark by monte carlo code McCARD

Abstract

In the Monte Carlo (MC) burnup analyses, the uncertainty of a tally estimate at a burnup step may be induced from four sources: the statistical uncertainty caused by a finite number of simulations, the nuclear covariance data, uncertainties of number densities, and cross-correlations between the nuclear data and the number densities. In this paper, the uncertainties of k inf, reaction rates, and number densities for a PWR pin-cell benchmark problem are quantified by an uncertainty propagation formulation in the MC burnup calculations. The required sensitivities of tallied parameters to the microscopic cross-sections and the number densities are estimated by the MC differential operator sampling method accompanied by the fission source perturbation. The uncertainty propagation analyses are conducted with two nuclear covariance data - ENDF/B-VII.1 and SCALE6.1/COVA libraries - and the numerical results are compared with each other. © 2012 Ho Jin Park et al.