• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.746-754
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• 2019

Vitrification of radioactive liquid waste (RLW) provides a feasible solution for isolating radionuclides from the biosphere for an extended period. In vitrification, base glass and radioactive waste are added simultaneously into the melter. Determination of heat and mass transfer rates is necessary for rational design and sizing of melter. For obtaining an assured product quality, knowledge of reaction kinetics associated with the thermal decomposition of waste constituents is essential. In this study Thermogravimetry (TG) - Differential Thermogravimetry (DTG) of eight kinds of nitrates and two oxides, which are major components of RLW, is investigated in the temperature range of 298-1273 K in the presence of base glasses of five component (5C) and seven component (7C). Studies on thermal behavior of constituents in RLW were carried out at heating rates ranging from 10 to $40\;K\;min^{-1}$ using TG - DTG. Thermal behavior and related kinetic parameters of waste constituents, in the presence of 5C and 7C base glass compositions were also investigated. The activation energy, pre-exponential factor and order of the reaction for the thermal decomposition of 24% waste oxide loaded glasses were estimated using Kissinger method.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.141-160
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• 2021

Unit 1 of the Kori Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) and Unit 1 of the Wolsong NPP are being prepared for decommissioning; their decommissioning is expected to generate large amounts of intermediate-level, low-level, and very low level Waste. Mixed waste containing both radioactive and hazardous substances is expected to be produced. Nevertheless, laws and regulations, such as the Korean Nuclear Safety Act and Waste Management Act, do not define clear regulatory guidelines for mixed waste. However, the United States has strictly enforced regulations on mixed waste, focusing on the human health and environmental effects of its hazardous components. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy regulate the radioactive components of mixed waste under the Atomic Energy Act. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates the hazardous waste component of mixed waste under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. In this study, the laws, regulations, and authorities pertaining to mixed waste in the United States are reviewed. Through comparison and analysis with waste management laws and regulations in Korea, a treatment direction for mixed waste is suggested. Such a treatment for mixed waste will increase the efficiency of managing mixed waste when decommissioning NPPs in the near future.

• Journal of Korea Society of Waste Management
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• v.35 no.7
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• pp.640-646
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• 2018

Biomass-fired power plants produce electricity and heat by burning biomass in a boiler. However, one of the most serious problems faced by these plants is severe corrosion. In biomass boilers, corrosion comes from burnt fuels containing alkali, chlorine, and other corrosive substances, causing boiler tube failures, leakages, and shorter lifetimes. To mitigate the problem, various approaches implying the use of additives have been proposed; for example, ammonium sulfate is added to convert the alkali chlorides (mainly KCl) into the less corrosive alkali sulfates. Among these approaches, the high temperature corrosion prevention technology based on ammonium sulfate has few power plants being applied to domestic power plants. This study presents the results obtained during the co-combustion of wood chips and waste in a circulating fluidized bed boiler. The aim was to investigate the characteristics of pollution load in domestic biomass power plants with ammonium sulfate injection. By injecting the ammonium sulfate, the KCl content decreased from 68.9 to 5 ppm and the NOx were reduced by 18.5 ppm, but $SO_2$ and HCl were increased by 93.3 and 68 ppm, respectively.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.532-548
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• 2021

Nuclear power plants contain several monitoring systems that can identify the in-vessel phenomena of a severe accident (SA). Though a lot of analysis and research is carried out on SA, right from the development of the nuclear industry, not all the possible circumstances are taken into consideration. Therefore, to improve the efficacy of the safety of nuclear power plants, additional analytical studies are needed that can directly monitor severe accident phenomena. This paper presents an interacting multiple model (IMM) based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) approach for the identification of in-vessel phenomena to provide the accident propagation information using reactor vessel (RV) out-wall temperature distribution during severe accidents in a nuclear power plant. The estimation of wall temperature is treated as a state estimation problem where the time-varying wall temperature is estimated using IMM employing three multiple models for temperature evolution. From the estimated RV out-wall temperature and rate of temperature, the in-vessel phenomena are identified such as core meltdown, corium relocation, reactor vessel damage, reflooding, etc. We tested the proposed method with five different types of SA scenarios and the results show that the proposed method has estimated the outer wall temperature with good accuracy.

• Journal of Hydrogen and New Energy
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.616-622
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• 2022

At the present time, interest in hydrogen is increasingly growing worldwide to tackle climate change. Korea also takes an action by announcing the first hydrogen economy implementation basic plan with the import targets of 22.9 million tons of hydrogen from oversea in 2050. To achieve this plan, it is very essential to establish an overseas hydrogen supply chain. In this paper, the study estimates the import price for hydrogen into basic scenario and comprehensive scenario, and also analyses economic feasibility considering price of the each technology.

• Elastomers and Composites
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2023

In this study, we investigate the liquid crystal (LC) alignment of LC cells created from plant-based polysaccharide derivatives, such as guar gum. Guar gum films exhibit satisfactorily high optical transparency in the visible light region (400-750 nm). For example, the transmittance of polyimide films, which are the most typically used LC alignment layers, is 87%, whereas that of guar gum films deposited onto a glass substrate at a wavelength of 550 nm is approximately 99%. The observed LC alignment depends on the rubbing depth. For example, an LC cell comprising a guar gum film fabricated via rubbing at rubbing depths of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4 mm exhibits a planar LC alignment, whereas it exhibits a vertical LC alignment at a rubbing depth of 0.5 mm. Additionally, the LC alignment is shown to be correlated with the total surface energy of the guar gum films. When the total surface energy of a rubbed guar gum film exceeds 58.10 mJ/m², an LC cell comprising the guar gum film exhibits a stable and vertical LC alignment. Therefore, guar gum can be used to realize the vertical alignment system of LC via a simple adjustment of the rubbing depth.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1420-1427
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• 2023

Seismic risk has received increased attention since the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan. The seismic risk of a nuclear power plant is evaluated via seismic probabilistic safety assessment (PSA), for which several methods are available. Recently, the discrete approach has become widely used. This approximates the seismic risk by discretizing the ground motion level interval into a small number of subintervals with the expectation of providing a conservative result. The present study examines the effect of the number of subintervals upon the results of seismic risk quantification. It is demonstrated that a small number of subintervals may lead to either an underestimation or overestimation of the seismic risk depending on the ground motion level. The present paper also provides a method for finding the boundaries between overestimation and underestimation regions, and illustrates the effect of the number of subintervals upon the seismic risk evaluation with an example. By providing a method for determining the effect of a small number of subintervals upon the results of seismic risk quantification, the present study will assist seismic PSA analysts to determine the appropriate number of subintervals and to better understand seismic risk quantification.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.12
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• pp.4408-4425
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• 2023

Alarm flood due to abnormality propagation is the most difficult alarm overloading problem in nuclear power plants (NPPs). Root-cause analysis is suggested to help operators in understand emergency events and plant status. Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) has been extensively applied in alarm management by virtue of the capability of explaining causal dependencies among alarms. However, there has never been a technique that can identify the actual root cause for complex alarm situations. This paper presents an automated root-cause analysis system based on MFM. The causal reasoning algorithm is first applied to identify several possible root causes that can lead to massive alarms. A novel root-cause ranking algorithm can subsequently be used to isolate the most likely faults from the other root-cause candidates. The proposed method is validated on a pressurized water reactor (PWR) simulator at HAMMLAB. The results show that the actual root cause is accurately identified for every tested operating scenario. The automation of root-cause identification and ranking affords the opportunity of real-time alarm analysis. It is believed that the study can further improve the situation awareness of operators in the alarm flooding situation.

• Journal of Radiation Industry
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.143-150
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• 2023

A graded approach applies safety requirements differentially, depending on the risk potential. An advantage of applying a graded approach is that safety assessments can be conducted repeatedly by focusing on areas with relatively higher risk than on those with low risk when decommissioning a nuclear power plant (NPP). The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommends applying a graded approach to decommissioning NPPs worldwide. In Korea, the definition of the graded approach requires to be clarified. This study compared the decommissioning method used in Korean NPPs with the IAEA graded approach and examined whether the graded approach can be applied to decommissioning NPPs in Korea. As a result of the comparison, the preliminary decommissioning plan for Shin-Kori Units 5 and 6 showed that the decommissioning method for Korean NPPs is similar to the five-step IAEA graded approach.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.223-233
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• 1976

The potassium equilibrium activity ratio ($AR^k_e$) and energies of exchange for replacement of ca+Mg by K ($E_k$) were measured for seven paddy soils to investigate their correlations with the exchangeable K (Kex) and uptake of K at different growth stages of rice plant. It was found that $AR^k_e$ had highly significant correlations at 1% level with uptake of K at maximum tillering, heading and harvesting stages, and also with Kex in soils at maximum tillering stage. The larger $AR^k_e$ of soils, the more uptake of K by rice plant. The fact indicates that uptake of K by the plant can be characterized in terms of $AR^k_e$ or energy of exchange of soils. In aspect of energy of exchange, higher uptake of K and yield of grain were observed from -2500 to -3000 calories per chemical equivalent, representing suitable balances between K and Ca+Mg in soils. Low uptake of K was observed at the energies of exchange below -3500 calories per chemical equivalent, which were prevalent in the ordinary acidic soils. From the correlations between energy of exchange and Kex, it can be concluded that at least 0.37 meq. of exchangeable K should be existed in 100g of dried acidic soil to keep suitable balances of K and Ca+Mg. The result shown that application of K adsorbed zeolite to paddy soils increased $AR^k_e$ and consequently brought about higher K uptake and grain yield. Therefore, a reasonable way recommended to get good balance of exchangeable K in the soil is applying 1.7 tonns of K adsorbed zeolite containing 60kg $K_2O$ per hectare.