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iLAMP: Neutron Absorber Material Monitoring for Spent Fuel Pools
The spent fuel pool at TVA’s Watts Bar nuclear power plant near Spring City, Tenn. (Photo: TVA)
Neutron absorber materials are used by nuclear power plants to maintain criticality safety margins in their spent nuclear fuel pools. These materials are typically in the form of fixed panels of a neutron-absorbing composite material that is placed within the fuel pools. (A comprehensive review of such materials used in wet storage pools and dry storage has been provided by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) [1]).
With increasing plant life, there is a need to maintain or establish a monitoring program for neutron absorber materials—if one is not already in place—as part of aging management plans for reactor spent fuel pools.
Such monitoring programs are necessary to verify that the neutron absorbers continue to provide the criticality safety margins relied upon in the criticality analyses of a reactor’s spent fuel pool. To do this, the monitoring program must be capable of identifying any changes to the material and quantifying those changes. It should be noted that not all the changes (for example minor pitting and blistering of the absorber material) will result in statistically or operationally significant impact on the criticality safety margins.
For monitoring neutron absorber materials in spent fuel pools, until recently, two alternatives existed—coupon testing and in situ measurements. A third option, called industry-wide learning aging management program (i-LAMP), was proposed by EPRI and is currently in the final stages of the regulatory review. The following sections describe these monitoring approaches.
E. C. Gomes, J. P. Duarte, P. F. Frutuoso e Melo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 1 | April 2016 | Pages 73-96
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this paper is to highlight and model the most important steps in cases of human failure in radiotherapy (teletherapy and brachytherapy) procedures by identifying possible modes of human failure. An approach via Bayesian networks (BNs) to model and highlight the most relevant steps of teletherapy and brachytherapy was used. Finally, as a technique for the quantification of BNs, an expert opinion elicitation procedure was used since no database is available.
In the case of teletherapy, observing only the stages of prescription, planning, and execution, it appears that the step that most increases the success probability, after consideration of preventive measures, is execution. This is in agreement with cases of errors and accidents reported in the literature, considering that more than 50% of these cases are related to the implementation phase. Related to brachytherapy, the most relevant factor was the use of equipment, whose increase in success probability after consideration of preventive measures was 17.2%, demonstrating the importance of a continuous specific training.
It is important to mention that the purpose of this study was not to calculate the risk associated with radiotherapy treatments but rather to check how accident prevention influences the success procedure and observe the relationship among all stages. An uncertainty analysis was performed of the expert data by considering that data scattering followed a normal or a lognormal distribution, due to data ranges considered. This analysis revealed that data scattering was better represented by normal distributions, and the results are consistent with pointwise estimates initially made.