Material Unaccounted for at the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor: The SEFOR MUF
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission contracted with the General Electric Company to design, construct, and operate the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR) to measure the Doppler effect for fast neutron breeder reactors. It contracted with Nuclear Fuel Services to fabricate the fuel rods for the reactor. When the reactor went critical in May, 1969, it appeared that some of the mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel rods did not contain the specified quantity of plutonium. The SEFOR operators soon found several fuel rods which appeared to be low in plutonium. The safeguards group at Brookhaven was asked to look into the problem and, if possible, determine how much plutonium was missing from the unirradiated rods and from the larger number which had been slightly irradiated in the reactor. It was decided that the plutonium content of the unirradiated and irradiated rods could be measured relative to a reference rod using a high resolution gamma-ray detector and also by neutron measurements using an auto-correlation circuit recently developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). During the next two years, Brookhaven personnel and C.V. Strain of NRL made several trips to the SEFOR reactor. About 250 of the 775 rods were measured by two or more methods, using a sodium-iodide detector, a high-resolution germanium detector, a neutron detector, or the reactor (to measure reactivity). The research team concluded that 4.6 ± 0.46 kg of plutonium was missing out of the 433 kg that the rods should have contained. This report describes the SEFOR experiment and the procedures used to determine the material unaccounted for, or MUF.
- Research Organization:
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-76CH00016
- OSTI ID:
- 10108554
- Report Number(s):
- BNL-52443; ON: DE95005653; IN: SSN-94-26; TRN: 95:001061
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 7 Nov 1994
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL PROTECTION
73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
FUEL RODS
FUEL SCANNING
PLUTONIUM
ACCOUNTING
SEFOR REACTOR
NONDESTRUCTIVE TESTING
Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
Criticality
Fast Oxide Reactor
SEFOR Reactor
Testing
Fuel Rods
Gamma-Ray Detector
Mixed Uranium-Plutonium Oxide
220600
055001
RESEARCH
TEST
TRAINING
PRODUCTION
IRRADIATION
MATERIALS TESTING REACTORS
TECHNICAL ASPECTS