PROGRAM FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLUTONIUM RECYCLE FOR USE IN LIGHT WATER MODERATED REACTORS. Quarterly Report No. 9, April 1-June 30, 1963

Technical Report · Mon Jul 15 04:00:00 EDT 1963

OSTI ID:4687049

Robkin, M A; Lagache, M P

The project fuel element received an estimated burnup of 831 Mwd/t during the quarter, which brings the total to 3165 Mwd/t. This exposure is as logged by VBWR operating personnel. Applying the same scale factor between logged exposure and Ce--Cs analysis of the first fuel sample gives a corrected exposure of 3774 Mwd/t. The differential solution experiment indicated that less than 1% of the contained plutonium occurred as segregated pure PuO/sub 2/. The hot spots ohserved by autoradiography of polished samples of fuel indicated that a substantial fraction of the PuO/sub 2/ is contained in the hot spots. Super- Ortho-Press plates were used to make enlargements of autoradiographs of polished unirradiated fuel pellets. Densitometer measurements were made on the enlargements. It was observed that the contrast range on the autoradiographs were too wide to allow the SOP plates to be exposed in the linear region of the D- log E curve for both the hot spots and the solid solution simultaneously. However, a five-minute alpha -exposure of a large hot spot gave the same darkening as a 480-minute alpha exposure of the background, from which it is possible to infer a corrected value of 82 times for the ratio of the Pu density in the hot spot to that in the background. Further debugging of E PITHERMBS, the epithermal extension of the BNL THERMOS code, was made and a test problem was run. (auth)

• Research Organization: General Electric Co. Vallecitos Atomic Lab., San Jose, Calif.
• NSA Number: NSA-17-033240
• OSTI ID: 4687049
• Report Number(s): GEAP-4303; EURAEC-755
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

ALPHA PARTICLES
BACKGROUND
BURNOUT
BURNUP
CERIUM
CESIUM
CONTAMINATION
DENSITY
FUEL ELEMENTS
FUELS
HOT SPOT
IRRADIATION
MEASURED VALUES
OPERATION
PELLETS
PLATES
PLUTONIUM
PLUTONIUM OXIDES
PROGRAMMING
RADIOACTIVITY
RADIOGRAPHY
REACTIVITY
REACTOR TECHNOLOGY
REACTORS
SOLID SOLUTIONS
USES
VBWR
WATER MODERATOR