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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.
P. E. Labeau, Z. Ould Amar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 146-157
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24468
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo games especially designed for probabilistic dynamics problems have been shown to be very efficient for the calculation of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) pressurizer unreliability. However, these methods rely on the implicit hypothesis that transition rates and probabilities, as well as control means response times, can be precisely determined. But reality is different: Because of a lack of knowledge, only crude estimations of transition rates can be obtained. Moreover, control device response times cannot be assumed constant for rapid transients. Therefore, considering distributed values of these quantities seems more realistic. Several attempts to take into account these uncertainties, while conserving as many advantages as possible of the high-efficiency simulation techniques, are summarized. The PWR pressurizer application is used to compare the capabilities of the proposed methods.