Critical Experiment Tests of Bowing and Expansion Reactivity Calculations for Liquid-Metal-Cooled Fast Reactors

Experiments done in several critical assemblies of the liquid-metal-cooled fast reactor type simulated core axial expansion, core radial expansion and bowing, coolant expansion, and control driveline expansion. For the most part, new experimental techniques were developed to perform these experiments. Calculations of the experiments basically used design-level methods except when it was necessary to investigate complexities peculiar to the experiments. It was found that these feedback reactivities generally are overpredicted, but the predictions are within 30% of the experimental values.