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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.
Edoardo Cavalieri d'Oro, Michael W. Golay
Nuclear Technology | Volume 179 | Number 1 | July 2012 | Pages 117-128
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Safeguards / Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A14073
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Although in the United States and worldwide, the acceptance of nuclear systems has been abundantly regulated from a safety standpoint, the regulation of the nonproliferation performance of these systems still needs to be formalized. For nonproliferation, there are no regulations, formal license processes, or protocols to follow similar to the ones used by the nuclear sector to quantify and address safety risks. Consensus on how to address nonproliferation standards has not been achieved yet by regulators, designers, and policy makers, despite the urgent need to construct a clear framework to understand and formalize nonproliferation requirements of future and current nuclear systems.Appropriate tools and policies are needed to systematically quantify the standard of proliferation performance of nuclear energy systems, and to define the boundaries within which proliferation metrics can be considered acceptable.This paper tackles these issues by setting up a framework where risk, specifically the risk to covertly acquire special nuclear materials, can be used to evaluate the antiproliferation performance of nuclear systems. Specifically, it presents a treatment that, built upon analogy with the nuclear safety case, incorporates all the relevant features needed to set up a risk-informed licensing process for nuclear nonproliferation. The conceived framework can be used to assist the evaluation of the different solutions proposed internationally in order to strengthen the current nonproliferation regime.