Partial Defect Verification of Spent Fuel Assemblies by PDET: Principle and Field Testing in Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility (CLAB) in Sweden
- Global Security Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550 (United States)
- SCK-CEN, Mol (Belgium)
- SKB in Oskarshamn (Sweden)
The need for the development of a credible method and instrument for partial defect verification of spent fuel has been emphasized over a few decades in the safeguards communities as the diverted spent fuel pins can be the source of nuclear terrorism or devices. The need is increasingly more important and even urgent as many countries have started to transfer spent fuel to so called 'difficult-to-access' areas such as dry storage casks, reprocessing or geological repositories. Partial defect verification is required by IAEA before spent fuel is placed into 'difficult-to-access' areas. Earlier, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has reported the successful development of a new, credible partial defect verification method for pressurized water reactor (PWR) spent fuel assemblies without use of operator data, and further reported the validation experiments using commercial spent fuel assemblies with some missing fuel pins. The method was found to be robust as the method is relatively invariant to the characteristic variations of spent fuel assemblies such as initial fuel enrichment, cooling time, and burn-up. Since then, the PDET system has been designed and prototyped for 17x17 PWR spent fuel assemblies, complete with data acquisition software and acquisition electronics. In this paper, a summary description of the PDET development followed by results of the first successful field testing using the integrated PDET system and actual spent fuel assemblies performed in a commercial spent fuel storage site, known as Central Interim Spent fuel Storage Facility (CLAB) in Sweden will be presented. In addition to partial defect detection initial studies have determined that the tool can be used to verify the operator declared average burnup of the assembly as well as intra-assembly burnup levels. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), New York, NY (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22531328
- Report Number(s):
- ANIMMA-2015-IO-280; TRN: US16V0333102269
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: ANIMMA 2015: 4. International Conference on Advancements in Nuclear Instrumentation Measurement Methods and their Applications, Lisboa (Portugal), 20-24 Apr 2015; Other Information: Country of input: France; 13 Refs.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
BURNUP
CASKS
COOLING TIME
DATA ACQUISITION
DESIGN
DRY STORAGE
FUEL PINS
LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY
PWR TYPE REACTORS
REPROCESSING
SAFEGUARDS
SECURITY
SPENT FUEL STORAGE
SPENT FUELS
SWEDEN
VALIDATION
VERIFICATION