A methodology for the design of non-uniform core configurations in the modified STACY facility

The safe retrieval of the fuel debris generated during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident poses a number of challenges, among which an important one is to ensure the criticality safety of the recovery operations. At the heart of the problem lies the intrinsically heterogeneous nature of the problem, and the appearance of complex and disordered media whose neutronic properties are difficult to accurately characterize and reproduce in neutron transport simulations. Typically, a similar, simpler, problem is encountered in the modeling of assemblies with missing fuel rods. In both problems, the availability of experimental facilities capable of validating both the nuclear data and the simulation schemes in heterogeneous configurations is crucial. The modified STACY installation has been specially designed to provide and carry out critical experiments, allowing for highly non-uniform configurations, that will directly support fuel debris recovery operations, but can also be used for other experimental programs. The present work describes a method to consistently and orderly sample non-uniform core configurations in the modified STACY facility, and proposes two critical heterogeneous core configurations. They have the advantage to present a high sensitivity to the water thermal scattering law, whose importance was found to be more significant for more heterogeneous configurations. The proposed experiments will contribute to the exploration and validation of heterogeneous critical systems. • A method is proposed to design critical experiments in the modified STACY facility. • The methodology is used to explore the design of heterogeneous critical experiments. • Two core configurations representing different degree of heterogeneity are proposed • They are particularly sensitive to Thermal Scattering Laws data.