Methodology and Software for Gross Defect Detection of Spent Nuclear Fuel at the Atucha-I Reactor [Novel Methodology and Software for Spent Fuel Gross Defect Detection at the Atucha-I Reactor]
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
- National Regulatory Authority - Argentina, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Here, fuel assemblies in the spent fuel pool are stored by suspending them in two vertically stacked layers at the Atucha Unit 1 nuclear power plant (Atucha-I). This introduces the unique problem of verifying the presence of fuel in either layer without physically moving the fuel assemblies. Given that the facility uses both natural uranium and slightly enriched uranium at 0.85 wt% 235U and has been in operation since 1974, a wide range of burnups and cooling times can exist in any given pool. A gross defect detection tool, the spent fuel neutron counter (SFNC), has been used at the site to verify the presence of fuel up to burnups of 8000 MWd/t. At higher discharge burnups, the existing signal processing software of the tool was found to fail due to nonlinearity of the source term with burnup.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC52-07NA27344
- OSTI ID:
- 1228002
- Report Number(s):
- LLNL-JRNL-656062
- Journal Information:
- Nuclear Technology, Vol. 192, Issue 1; ISSN 0029-5450
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis - formerly American Nuclear Society (ANS)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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