- EOLE & MINERVE
EOLE
A Critical Facility for the Neutronics Study of Light
Water Moderated Lattices
The EOLE critical facility is a very low power experimental reactor devoted to the neutronic study of moderated lattices, in particular Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) and Boiling Water Reactors (BWR).The first start up occurred in 1965. It is composed of a structure in concrete giving biological shielding for a flux level up to 109 n.cm-2.s-1, where two concentric cylindrical vessels are inserted. Its high flexibility enables one to build complex experimental lattices representative of core configurations to be studied. The cores are completely reflected by water, circulating through a thermoregulation system enabling the control of the temperature between 5°C and 90°C, with/without boron. Each core is controlled by a system of 4 safety rods, and one pilot rod for the fine power tuning, whose compositions and positions are adapted to the studied cores.
MINERVE
An Experimental Facility for the Neutronics Study of Thermal and Fast Reactors
The experimental reactor MINERVE is devoted to neutronics studies of lattices of different reactor types. It achieved its first criticality in 1959 at the centre of Fontenay-aux-Roses (near Paris). The reactor was transferred to Cadarache in 1977.
The core is built in a parallelepiped pool of stainless steel of about 140 m3. The moderator is distilled water and the cooling is performed by natural convection.
The driver zone consists of MTR-type fuel assemblies made of enriched metallic uranium/aluminium plates submerged under 3 meters of water. The thermal flux is about 109 n.cm-².s -1 (100 Watts).
The experiments are located in a central square cavity with a size of about 70 cm ´ 70 cm, that contains coupled lattices built in such a way that they can reproduce the neutronics spectra of a fast reactor (ERMINE), a light water reactor (MELODIE), an under-moderated reactors (CARMEN) and even a heavy water reactor (ELOISE).
The reactor is controlled using 4 hafnium rods. The entire control system was renewed in 2002.
A new safety calculation scheme was developed in 2005 based on the TRIPOLI4 and MCNP-4C Monte Carlo codes and on the APOLLO2 deterministic code.
