The nuclear industry interest in advanced fuel and reactor design often drives towards fuel with uranium enrichments greater than 5 wt% 235U. Unfortunately, little data exists, in the form of reactor physics and criticality benchmarks, for uranium enrichments ranging between 5 and 10 wt% 235U. The primary purpose of this project is to provide benchmarks for fuel similar to what may be required for advanced light water reactors (LWRs). These experiments will ultimately provide additional information for application to the criticality-safety bases for commercial fuel facilities handling greater than 5 wt% 235U fuel. Because these experiments are designed primarily to be reactor physics benchmarks, and not just criticality benchmarks, it is desired to include measurements of critical boron concentration, relative pin powers, relative assembly flux, burnable absorber worth, and isothermal temperature coefficients, for each configuration. Guidelines for developing an appropriate experimental configuration include bounding current pressurized water and boiling water reactor (PWR and BWR, respectively) fuel-to-water and metal-to-water ratios and maintaining consistency between experiment geometry and current PWR and BWR analysis tools used for reload designs (e.g., CASMO/SIMULATE).
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