Comparative study of nuclear data libraries for tritium breeding calculations in fusion blankets

Abstract

We performed a comparative study on tritium breeding calculations in helium-cooled lithium oxide, liquid lithium, and lithium lead eutectic blankets using ENDF/B-V based multigroup libraries: VITAMIN-E (174 groups), MATXS5 (30 groups), MATXS6 (80 groups), and MATXS8 (187 groups). The results were tested against MCNP continuous energy Monte Carlo calculations. We found that all these libraries give similar tritium breeding values (within 2%) in the reference blankets. However, large discrepancies in calculated tritium breeding ratios may occur in some neutron “leaky” blankets due to a mismatch between weighting functions and blanket neutron spectra.