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Mirion announces appointments
Mirion Technologies has announced three senior leadership appointments designed to support its global nuclear and medical businesses while advancing a company-wide digital and AI strategy. The leadership changes come as Mirion seeks to advance innovation and maintain strong performance in nuclear energy, radiation safety, and medical applications.
Joé M. Conde, Manuel Recio
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 1 | April 1995 | Pages 22-32
Technical Paper | Burnup Credit / Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35093
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several Spanish light water reactor commercial nuclear power plants are close to maximum spent-fuel pool storage capacity. The utilities are working on the implementation of state-of-the-art methods to increase the storage capacity, including both changes in the pool design (reracking) and the implementation of new analysis approaches with reduced conservatism (burnup credit). Burnup credit criticality safety analyses have been approved for two pressurized water reactor plants (four units) and one boiling water reactor (BWR); another BWR storage analysis is being developed at this moment. The elimination of the “fresh fuel assumption” increases the complexity of the criticality analysis to be performed, sometimes putting into question the capability of the analytic tools to properly describe this new situation and increasing the scope of the scenarios to be analyzed. From a regulatory perspective, the reactivity reduction associated with burnup of the fuel can be given credit only if the exposure of each fuel bundle can be known with enough accuracy. Subcriticality of spent-fuel storage depends mainly on the initial fuel enrichment, storage geometry, fuel exposure history, and cooling time. The last two aspects introduce new uncertainties in the criticality analysis that should be quantified in an adequate way. In addition, each and every fuel bundle has its own specific exposure history, so that strong assumptions and simplified calculational schemes have to be developed to undertake the analysis. The Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear (CSN), Spanish regulatory authority on the matter of nuclear safety and radiation protection, plays an active role in the development of analysis methods to support burnup credit, making proposals that may be beneficial in terms of risk and cost while keeping the widest safety margins possible.