Verification and application of superMC3.3 to lead-bismuth-cooled fast reactor

Lead-cooled fast reactors have multilayered designs and large internal temperature differences, which cause challenges in simulating reactor physics. SuperMC, a large-scale integrated software system for neutronics design, is inherently able to address complex geome-tries and multi-temperature problems. The purpose of this study is to verify the applicability of SuperMC to the lead-bismuth-cooled fast reactor RBEC-M. The multi-temperature cross-section generation function of SuperMC was employed and showed good performance. Based on the ENDF/B-VII.1 library, the effective multiplication factor k_eff obtained by SuperMC showed good agreement with those from previous works. The relationship of k_eff and¹⁵N enrichment applied to the fuel material was also studied, with the results showing that increased¹⁵N could significantly improve k_eff. The axial power profile and kinetics parameters for the benchmark were then calculated and analyzed. This work thus verified the applicability of SuperMC for comprehensive neutronics simulations for lead-bismuth-cooled fast reactors.