Integral experiments at the National Ignition Facility for Nuclear Data Validation on Modeled Neutron Flux Spectra
ORAL
Abstract
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a unique source of neutrons that uses laser inertial confinement to drive the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction. The reaction produces a very high flux output and a monoenergetic 14.06 MeV neutron source peak. With such a strong source, various possibilities are opening up for a list of applications by tailoring the neutron spectra. The presented research focuses on using neutrons with various energies for neutron activation studies and cross section measurements. The idea is to build optimized energy tuning assemblies to "isolate" and emphasize specific energy channels for the validation of known data weaknesses at energies below 14 MeV. UC Berkeley’s newly developed metaheuristic optimization software is used to design ETAs for a series of integral benchmarking experiments. The latter allows to investigate the impact of the nuclear data on materials of interest for NIF’s stewardship.
*This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. Funding was supported by the LLNL Graduate Scholar Program. This research uses Savio computational cluster provided by the Berkeley Research Computing program at the University of California (supported by the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Vice Chancellor for Research, and Chief Information Officer).
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Presenters
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Sandra Bogetic
- Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley