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on 2/4/26 at 2:46 PM
The OECD/NEA Working Party on the Physics of Plutonium Fuels and Innovative Fuel Cycles and the Task Force on Reactor-based Plutonium Disposition organised an international benchmark exercise based on KRITZ UO2 and MOX critical configurations. The configurations consisted of regular rectangular lattices of fuel rods in light water. Each configuration utilised either UO2 fuel rods or MOX fuel rods, and was made critical at room temperature and at elevated temperature. No configuration with interspersed UO2 and MOX fuel rods was considered. The specific characteristic of this exercise is that the MOX fuel contained weapons-grade plutonium, and that the core criticality was achieved at an elevated temperature of ~245C. The aim of this exercise was to investigate the predictive capability of the current production codes and nuclear data libraries used for analysing MOX-fuelled systems, and to compare the accuracy of the predictions for the MOX- and UO2-fuelled configurations.
