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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Yan Cao, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 3 | July 2010 | Pages 270-282
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-32
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For pulsed-neutron experiments performed in a subcritical reactor, the reactivity obtained from the area-ratio method is sensitive to detector positions. The spatial effects are induced by the presence of both the prompt neutron harmonics and the delayed neutron harmonics in the reactor. The traditional kinetics distortion factor is only limited to correcting the spatial effects caused by the fundamental prompt- mode. In this paper, we derive spatial correction factors fp and fd to account for spatial effects induced by the prompt neutron harmonics and the delayed neutron harmonics, respectively. Our numerical simulations with the FX2-TH time-dependent multigroup diffusion code indicate that the high-order prompt neutron harmonics lead to significant spatial effects and cannot be neglected in calculating the spatial correction factors. The prompt spatial correction factor fp can be simply determined by the ratio of the normalized detector responses corresponding to the fundamental k-mode and the prompt neutron flux integrated over the pulse period. Thus, it is convenient to calculate and provides physically intuitive explanations on the spatial dependence of reactivity measured in the MUSE-4 experiments: overestimation of the subcriticality in regions close to the external neutron source and underestimation of the subcriticality away from the source but within the fuel region.
