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What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
A. Gruel, P. Leconte, D. Bernard, P. Archier, G. Noguère
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 229-244
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-113
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To take into account the reactivity loss in spent fuels, an experimental program was set up in 1993 at CEA-Cadarache, France, oscillating separated fission products (FPs) in the MINERVE reactor. Reactivity worth measurements of small samples allow the extraction of information about nuclear data of the studied isotopes. A fully validated calculation scheme has been implemented to interpret pile-oscillation measurements. Therefore, calculation over experiment ratios can be accurately transposed to trends in the integral capture cross section of the FPs. With the European JEFF3.1.1 library, results show a discrepancy below 3% for several nuclides: 155Gd, 149, 152Sm, 143Nd, and 95Mo, but improvements may be needed for some others: 133Cs, 103Rh, 99Ru, and 153Eu. Based on the Integral Data Assimilation technique, we propose new thermal cross-section values, (348 ± 14) b and (42 478 ± 1793) b, for two of the most absorbing nuclides, 143Nd and 149Sm, respectively.
