Operator decision aid for breached fuel operation in liquid-metal-cooled nuclear reactors

Conference · Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1991 · Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; (United States)

OSTI ID:5765112

Gross, K C; Hawkins, R E; Nickless, W K ^[1]

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1. Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)

All current and future-design liquid-metal-cooled reactors (LMRs) rely on the detection and monitoring of delayed-neutron (DN) emitters for annunciation and surveillance of fuel-cladding defects. Extensive breached-fuel testing at Argonne National Laboratory's (ANL's) Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 (EBR-2) has led to the discovery that the age' associated with a fuel breach is not constant with time. The age is defined as the sum of the transit time T{sub tr} of the DN emitters from the core to the detector and the isotopic hold-up time T{sub h} of the DN emitters in the fuel. These parameters, along with the DN detector (DND) count rates, have been incorporated into an algorithm that computes an equivalent recoil area (ERA), which is a measure of the surface area of exposed fuel at the breach site. The purpose of this paper is to report the development of an expert system that provides continuous assessment of the safety significance and technical specification conformance of DN signals during breached-fuel operation. The completed expert system has been parallelized on an innovative distributed-memory network-computing system that enables the computationally intensive kernel of the expert system to run in parallel on a group of low-cost Unix workstations.

• OSTI ID: 5765112
• Report Number(s): CONF-910603-; CODEN: TANSA
• Journal Information: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; (United States), Vol. 63; Conference: Annual meeting of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), Orlando, FL (United States), 2-6 Jun 1991; ISSN 0003-018X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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AVAILABILITY
CONTROL ROOMS
COVER GAS
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