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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
L. Pantera, Y. Garnier, F. Jeury
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 2 | June 2016 | Pages 247-260
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CABRI facility is an experimental nuclear reactor of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) designed to study the behavior of fuel rods at high burnup under reactivity initiated accident conditions, such as a control rod ejection. The distinctive feature of this reactor is its reactivity injection system. The power can rise from 100 kW to 25 GW in a few milliseconds. To know the energy released into a test rod, it is necessary to access the driver core power online. The neutron flux is measured online by compensated boron chambers. These neutron detectors are calibrated during the commissioning phase thanks to standards given by a conventional heat balance. The boron chamber signal depends on the temperature of the pool and the magnitude of the core power according to a nonlinear multivariate model. The uncertainties of the standards and those of the neutron chamber signal cannot be neglected. Moreover, the size of the sample is very small due to the operational constraints. A classic regression method does not take into account all these parameters. In such a situation, we show how the statistical bootstrap method can prove to be a useful and easy tool in tackling this issue. This paper describes first the adjustment of the calibration model that will be used for the prediction during the core power transient and second how we take into account both the uncertainties of the physical variables and the small size of the experimental sample.
