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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Anton Lüthi, Rakesh Chawla, Gérald Rimpault
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 3 | July 2001 | Pages 233-255
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new calculational scheme has been developed for the accurate assessment of gamma heating in fast reactors, its special feature being the determination of the gamma source distribution that is formulated in a near-to-exact manner. The improved methodology, which has been implemented into the ERANOS (European Reactor Analysis Optimized System) code package, is currently validated for Pu-burning configurations, for which gamma-heating target accuracies are particularly high. This has been accomplished through comparisons with new integral measurements conducted at the MASURCA facility, as well as with reevaluated earlier experiments. In the new measurements, absolute gamma-heating rates were determined in PuO2/UO2-fueled cores surrounded by a steel/sodium reflector, mainly using TLD-700 thermoluminescent dosimeters. Thereby, a considerable effort was undertaken to minimize systematic errors. The calculation/experiment values determined from the analysis of the critical experiments are 0.90 for the PuO2/UO2 core region, 0.84 for the steel/sodium reflector, and 0.89 for an internal steel/sodium diluent zone. The most plausible causes for the observed discrepancies have been identified to be data related, i.e., too low fission gamma energies and too low capture cross sections for the structural elements. The transferability of the current validation findings to a modified Superphénix configuration, in which the radial fertile blanket is replaced by a steel/sodium reflector, and to the 1500 MW(electric) Pu-burning CAPRA 4/94 reference design has been demonstrated.
