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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
H.F. Lucas, F. Markun
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 99 | Number 1 | May 1988 | Pages 82-87
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A23546
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A procedure has been developed for preparing 3- to 9-ℓ volumes of air under natural conditions with a known concentration of 222Rn to be used for calibrating radon systems. Air is passed into a plastic bag through a standard 226Ra solution (prepared by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards) contained in an emanation flask. This plastic bag retains 222Rn with little loss into or through the bag walls. The mean ratios of the 222Rn in the air at 2 and 7 days after filling to that immediately after filling were 0.992 ± 0.006 and 0.969 ± 0.008, which suggests a rate of radon loss into the bag of 0.4 ± 0.1%/day. The air from the bag was used to calibrate six Lucas chambers. Each chamber was calibrated 11 times with an average fractional standard error of the mean of 0.5%. This value is greater than the 0.2% expected from counting errors alone and suggests that the entire calibration procedure plus the counting system introduces a systematic standard deviation of 1.4% for each individual calibration and counting procedure. The bag and calibrated counters can also be used to determine the 226Ra and the 222Rn content of water. In addition, by replacing the air with other flush gases, calibration factors for gas mixtures other than air can be determined. The accuracy of these calibrations was verified by comparison with four methods, three of which are completely independent. The results by all four methods agree within ±1%.