REVIEW ON THE NEUTRON SOURCE STRENGTH OF HEU METAL BURST REACTOR

There were two similar series of burst waiting time experiments carried out on Godiva-II and Caliban respectively and analyzed for neutron initiation study, unfortunately both the strength of spontaneous fission neutron source given in the published papers are not consistent with the spontaneous fission data of U-235 and U-238. In this paper, the discrepancies of spontaneous fission data of U-235 and U-238 from different references are reviewed and clarified and the correct strength of spontaneous fission neutron source for Godiva-II and Caliban are calculated respectively, then the multiplication equivalence method of arbitrary source is introduced and the equivalent fundamental-mode(EFM) co-efficiencies of spontaneous fission neutron source for Godiva-II and Caliban are calculated with MC software, lastly the strength of neutron source for these two HEU metal burst reactor in EFM are deduced. The EFM neutron strength of this two burst reactors are much less than proposed values used for burst waiting investigation in published papers respectively, and with the new data, the inconsistency of burst waiting time to the published results is presented and discussed.