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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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.
K. Lisa Reed, Farzad Rahnema, Dingkang Zhang, Dan Ilas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1686-1697
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1757962
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a set of stylized numerical benchmark problems is developed. These problems are based on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory preconceptual design of a fluoride-salt-cooled small modular advanced high-temperature reactor, or SmAHTR, that uses prismatic fuel assemblies with cylindrical pins/rods containing tri-isotropic fuel particles. A detailed description of the benchmark problems is achieved by closing several outstanding design gaps and modifying the coolant channel shape to reduce bypass flow for improved coolant and fuel temperature distributions. The benchmark problems, while stylized, retain the important thermal-hydraulic and reactor physics features (e.g., fuel particles) necessary for benchmarking tools for reactor core analysis.
In addition to the full description, detailed reference results such as the eigenvalue (keff) and fuel pin and assembly-averaged fission density distributions are provided for five benchmark problems: full-length fuel assemblies with control rods fully withdrawn and inserted, and full core with all control rods withdrawn, all control rods fully inserted, and some control rods fully inserted (near-critical core). The provided results are calculated using the continuous-energy Monte Carlo code MCNP.