Impact of Nuclear Data Uncertainties on Transmutation of Actinides in Accelerator-Driven Assemblies

The potential impact of nuclear data uncertainties on a large number of performance parameters of reactor cores dedicated to the transmutation of radioactive wastes is discussed. An uncertainty analysis has been performed based on sensitivity theory, which underlines the cross sections, the energy range, and the isotopes that are responsible for the most significant uncertainties.

To provide guidelines on priorities for new evaluations or validation experiments, required accuracies on specific nuclear data have been derived, accounting for target accuracies on major design parameters. The required accuracies (mostly in the energy region below 20 MeV), in particular for minor actinide data, are of the same order of magnitude of the achieved accuracies on major actinides. Specific requirements also concern the improvement of minor actinide data related to decay heat and effective delayed-neutron fraction assessment.