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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Retrieval of nuclear waste canisters from a borehole
Borehole disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level waste (HLW) uses off-the-shelf directional drilling technology developed and commercialized by the oil and gas sectors. It is a technology that has been gaining traction in recent years in the nuclear industry. Disposal can be done in one or more boreholes (including an array) drilled into suitable sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic host rocks. Waste is encapsulated in specialized corrosion-resistant canisters, which are placed end to end in disposal sections of relatively small-diameter boreholes that have been cased and fluid-filled. After emplacement, the vertical access hole is plugged and backfilled as an engineered barrier.
C. Pralong Fauchère, M. Murphy, F. Jatuff, R. Chawla
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 150 | Number 1 | May 2005 | Pages 27-36
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2499
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of the LWR-PROTEUS project - an extended validation program for advanced light water reactor core analysis tools conducted at the Paul Scherrer Institute - the radial, internal variations of the total fission rate (Ftot) and the capture rate in 238U (C8) have been calculated for zero-burnup pins of a Westinghouse SVEA-96+ boiling water reactor fuel assembly using two codes, namely, CASMO-4 and HELIOS. While Ftot distributions predicted by CASMO-4 and HELIOS are in good agreement, C8 distributions show significant inconsistencies (20 to 30%). The calculations are compared with experimental results obtained using single photon emission computerized tomography for several SVEA-96+ pins irradiated in the zero-power reactor PROTEUS. The comparisons confirm the predicted shape of the Ftot distributions within UO2 pins and clearly indicate that HELIOS within-pin predictions for C8 are more reliable than CASMO-4 results. This is important for the derivation of gamma-ray self-absorption corrections when pin-integrated reaction rates are to be determined using the gamma-scanning technique. Thus, the use of CASMO-4-type within-pin distributions would lead to 3 to 4% discrepancies in the absolute, self-absorption-corrected pin-integrated values deduced for C8 and hence for C8/Ftot. For relative C8 distributions, the discrepancy would be much smaller, namely, up to ~1% if pins containing a burnable absorber are involved.