XSgen: A Cross Section Generation Methodology for Fuel Cycle Simulation

TL;DR

This paper presents XSgen, a methodology and software tool for generating time-dependent, medium fidelity reactor cross sections by coupling neutron transport and depletion calculations, validated against NEA benchmarks.

Contribution

Introduction of XSgen, a novel software that couples neutron transport with depletion calculations to generate medium fidelity reactor cross sections for fuel cycle simulation.

Findings

XSgen accurately produces datasets matching NEA benchmarks.

XSgen successfully generates cross sections for uranium LWR and MOX reactors.

The methodology enables improved reactor modeling in fuel cycle simulations.

Abstract

This work investigates a method for generating medium fidelity reactor model cross sections. The methodology used here couples a neutron transport code with a depletion calculator. Together the two can be used to generate time dependent group cross sections for medium fidelity reactor models in fuel cycle simulation. This work analyzes XSgen, a software that performs the functions mentioned above. Addtionally, it is shown that XSgen is capable of creating datasets for a medium fidelity reactor model known as Bright-lite. The results of this work show that XSgen produces datasets that match NEA benchmarks for both uranium based LWR, and MOX reactors.