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iLAMP: Neutron Absorber Material Monitoring for Spent Fuel Pools
The spent fuel pool at TVA’s Watts Bar nuclear power plant near Spring City, Tenn. (Photo: TVA)
Neutron absorber materials are used by nuclear power plants to maintain criticality safety margins in their spent nuclear fuel pools. These materials are typically in the form of fixed panels of a neutron-absorbing composite material that is placed within the fuel pools. (A comprehensive review of such materials used in wet storage pools and dry storage has been provided by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) [1]).
With increasing plant life, there is a need to maintain or establish a monitoring program for neutron absorber materials—if one is not already in place—as part of aging management plans for reactor spent fuel pools.
Such monitoring programs are necessary to verify that the neutron absorbers continue to provide the criticality safety margins relied upon in the criticality analyses of a reactor’s spent fuel pool. To do this, the monitoring program must be capable of identifying any changes to the material and quantifying those changes. It should be noted that not all the changes (for example minor pitting and blistering of the absorber material) will result in statistically or operationally significant impact on the criticality safety margins.
For monitoring neutron absorber materials in spent fuel pools, until recently, two alternatives existed—coupon testing and in situ measurements. A third option, called industry-wide learning aging management program (i-LAMP), was proposed by EPRI and is currently in the final stages of the regulatory review. The following sections describe these monitoring approaches.
Manasi Goswami, Sanjay Gupta, Feroz Ahmed
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 133 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 342-349
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2094
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In view of the blanket design of a futuristic deuterium-tritium fusion reactor, a time-dependent study of 14-MeV neutrons has been carried out in bare lithium and Li2O blanket assemblies with different concentrations of 6Li nuclei. For assemblies of different sizes, time-dependent total neutron fluxes, a tritium production rate (TPR), and a tritium breeding ratio (TBR) up to 40% concentration of 6Li (natural concentration being 7.42 at.%) have been reported. A multigroup diffusion equation and eigenfunction expansion method has been used. This study shows that for any concentration of 6Li, the values of TPR as well as TBR are higher for a Li2O assembly than those obtained for all corresponding (of same size) assemblies of lithium. However, for a given assembly of lithium or Li2O, the TBR values do not show any observable change with 6Li concentration beyond ~40%. Further, for any concentration, the values of TPR and TBR decrease substantially in both types of systems as the side of the cubic assembly is reduced from 1 to 0.5 m.