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Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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.
Lorenzo P. Pagani, George E. Apostolakis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 153 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 9-17
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3685
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The work presented in this paper is part of the broader issue of quantification of safety margins within a load-capacity framework in which uncertainties in loads and capacities are identified and quantified. The present paper describes an example of quantification of uncertainty in the capacity, i.e., the fuel failure enthalpy given a burnup level. The phenomena arising at high burnup are characterized by large uncertainties, as indicated by the scatter in the experimental data. We propose a framework for the probabilistic analysis of the failure limit, i.e., the enthalpy at failure, as a function of burnup. As an example, we obtain the distribution of the failure enthalpy for a Ziracloy-4 rod subjected to a reactivity-initiated accident in a pressurized water reactor by propagating the relevant uncertainties. We use the FRAPCON and FRAPTRAN computer codes, as well as a model for the probability of spallation, to simulate the transient and to obtain data points to derive the conditional probability distribution of the failure enthalpy at a given burnup level. The final results show that the distribution of the failure enthalpy shifts to lower values as burnup increases and that spallation is an important phenomenon.