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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
W. S. Yang, P. J. Finck, H. Khalil
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 111 | Number 1 | May 1992 | Pages 21-33
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-A23920
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reconstruction method is developed for recovering pin burnup characteristics from fuel cycle calculations performed in hexagonal-z geometry using the nodal diffusion option of the DIF3D/REBUS-3 code system. Intranodal distributions of group fluxes, nuclide densities, power density, burnup, and fluence are efficiently computed using polynomial shapes constrained to satisfy nodal information. The accuracy of the method is tested by performing several fast reactor numerical benchmark calculations and by comparing predicted local burnups with values measured for experimental assemblies in the Experimental Breeder Reactor II. The results indicate that the reconstruction methods are quite accurate yielding maximum errors in power and nuclide densities that are <2% for driver assemblies and typically <5% for blanket assemblies.