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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Naeem M. Abdurrahman, Georgeta Radulescu, Igor Carron
Nuclear Technology | Volume 127 | Number 3 | September 1999 | Pages 315-331
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3004
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Saxton critical experiments, which used mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel of 6.6 wt% PuO2 in natural UO2 and UO2 fuel of 5.74 wt% 235U, are analyzed with MCNP-4B and continuous-energy cross-section libraries ENDF/B-V and ENDF/B-VI. An excellent agreement of calculated and experimental effective multiplication factors for the entire set of 1.3208-cm MOX lattices and 1.4224-cm MOX and UO2 lattices was obtained. The analysis of criticality calculations for the five different lattice pitches show a bias with lattice pitch, which led to an increase of ~0.8% when doubling the lattice pitch. Good agreement between calculated and measured data was obtained for some of the relative power distribution experiments for MOX single-region cores and MOX/UO2 multiregion cores; however, for others the agreement was less satisfactory. No significant difference in the results for relative power with the two libraries was observed.