Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency International Benchmark on the VENUS-2 MOX Core Measurements

Within the framework of the Nuclear Energy Agency Nuclear Science Committee, theoretical physics benchmarks and multiple recycling issues related to various mixed-oxide (MOX)-fueled systems have been studied. Many improvements and clarifications in nuclear data libraries and calculation methods have been achieved from the results of the theoretical benchmarks performed. However, it was felt that there was also a need to link these findings to data from experiments. Hence, a blind international benchmark exercise based on the two-dimensional VENUS-2 MOX core measurement data was carried out. Twelve participants from ten countries participated in the benchmark. Both the deterministic and the Monte Carlo methods were applied with different nuclear data sets. This technical note provides a comparative analysis between calculated and measured results. Comparison with experimental results identified the origins of discrepancies between calculations and measurements and enabled the quantitative comparison of the relative merits of the different calculation methods.