Spectrum Indexes and Minor Actinides measurements in several fast lead cooled VENUS-F zero power critical cores

Accelerator Driven systems (ADS) along with traditional fast reactors are under study as a possible mean to transmute minor actinides (MA) and long lived fission products (LLFP). The Fast Reactor Experiments for hybrid Applications (FREYA [1]) European FP7 project was launched in 2011 to support the designs of the ADS MYRRHA [2] and lead fast reactor (LFR) ALFRED [3]. The main aim of the FREYA project is to validate reactivity monitoring methods in sub-critical cores, but essential efforts were also devoted to the validation of MA data in several VENUS-F zero power critical assemblies simulating LFR and MYRRHA critical cores. In these critical VENUS-F assemblies, fission rate ratios of MA such as Np-237, Am-241 as well as Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-242 and U-238 to U-235 were measured using calibrated fission chambers. The measurements were analyzed using advanced computational tools including deterministic and stochastic codes and recent nuclear data sets. The C/E results of these fission rate ratios in several fast neutron lead cooled VENUS-F zero power assemblies are presented and discussed.