Benchmarking a Fission-Product Release Computer Program Containing a Gibbs Energy Minimizer

Abstract

The computer program SOURCE IST 2.0P11, and previous versions of SOURCE 2.0, contain a 1997 model of fission-product vaporization, developed by B.J. Corse et al., based on lookup tables generated with the FACT computer program. That model was tractable on computers of that day. However, the understanding of fuel thermochemistry has advanced since that time. Combining: a) the newer Royal Military College of Canada thermodynamic model of uranium dioxide fuel, b) a new model for fission-product vaporization from the fuel surface, c) a user-callable thermodynamics subroutine library, d) an updated nuclide list, and e) an updated nuclear physics data library; a prototype computer program was created to perform thermodynamic calculations internally. The resulting prototype code (with updated and revised data) has been benchmarked against experimental results previously used for validation of a Fission-Product Release code. The full paper will describe the results and the details of the benchmark exercise.