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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.
Paul R. Garabedian, Long-Poe Ku, the ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 400-405
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A721
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The discovery of quasiaxially symmetric stellarators whose magnetic spectrum has approximate two-dimensional symmetry opens up the possibility of designing fusion reactors that have tokamak transport and stellarator stability. Prototypes with two or three field periods have asymmetries almost as small as the coefficients for a typical tokamak that are associated with ripple from the toroidal coils or helical excursion of the magnetic axis resulting from instability. We have found modular coils that are only moderately twisted and produce robust flux surfaces that do not deteriorate when changes are made in the magnetic field. This work is bolstered by recent stellarator experiments that have exceeded stability limits predicted by linear theory. The problem may be that force balance and stability are lost across islands if the equilibrium equations are not in conservation form.