Development of the CRISP Package for Spallation Studies and Accelerator-Driven Systems

Abstract

Power generation from nuclear reactors provides an almost inexhaustive power source due to the huge quantities of nuclear fuel existent in our planet, which guarantees its utilization for thousands of years. Interest has been shifted to the so-called hybrid reactors [accelerator-driven systems (ADS)] as an alternative technology for power generation and transmutation, thus requiring precise knowledge about nuclear structure and nuclear reaction characteristics. Research groups from Instituto de Fisica, Universidade de São Paulo and Brazilian Center for Research in Physics made a joint effort to develop a computer program, CRISP, to calculate the intranuclear cascade proprieties and the nuclear evaporation process, present in all nuclear reactions with energies above a few tens of mega-electron-volts, using Monte Carlo techniques. Some reaction channels were included in these programs, resulting in a more realistic representation of the processes involved, aiming at reactor physics studies and academic studies about hadron and meson properties in nuclear matter. Some results obtained with this code and a comparison with experimental data are presented. Although all these results are preliminary, they are very consistent with the available experimental data. Since the applicability of the CRISP package has a wide range of options, especially in ADS, some results describing the effectiveness of the code were achieved.