• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제54권7호
• /
• pp.2586-2591
• /
• 2022

In the present work, we have irradiated the DI-BSCCO superconducting tapes with the 100 keV deuterium ions to investigate the effect of ion irradiation on their critical current (Ic). The damage simulations are carried out using the binary collision approximation method to get the spatial distribution and depth profile of the damage events in the high temperature superconducting (HTS) tape. The point defects are formed near the surface of the HTS tape. These point defects change the vortex profile in the superconducting tape. Due to the long-range interaction of vortices with each other, the Ic of the tape degrades at the 77 K and self magnetic field. The radiation dose of 2.90 MGy degrades the 44% critical current of the tape. The results of the displacement per atom (dpa) and dose deposited by the deuterium ions are used to fit an empirical relation for predicting the degradation of the Ic of the tape. We include the dpa, dose and columnar defect terms produced by the incident particles in the empirical relation. The fitted empirical relation predicts that light ion irradiation degrades the Ic in the DI-BSCCO tape at the self field. This empirical relation can also be used in neutron irradiation to predict the lifetime of the DI-BSCCO tape. The change in the Ic of the DI-BSCCO tape due to deuterium irradiation is compared with the other second-generation HTS tape irradiated with energetic radiation.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
• /
• 제45권3호
• /
• pp.130-141
• /
• 2020

Background: Concrete activation in cyclotron vaults is a major concern associated with their decommissioning because a considerable amount of activated concrete is generated by secondary neutrons during the operation of cyclotrons. Reducing the amount of activated concrete is important because of the high cost associated with radioactive waste management. This study aims to investigate the capability of the neutron absorbing materials to reduce concrete activation. Materials and Methods: The Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code System (PHITS) code was used to simulate a cyclotron target and room. The dimensions of the room were 457 cm (length), 470 cm (width), and 320 cm (height). Gd₂O₃, B₄C, polyethylene (PE), and borated (5 wt% ^natB) PE with thicknesses of 5, 10, and 15 cm and their different combinations were selected as neutron absorbing materials. They were placed on the concrete walls to determine their effects on thermal neutrons. Thin B₄C and Gd₂O₃ were placed between the concrete wall and additional PE shield separately to decrease the required thickness of the additional shield, and the thermal neutron flux at certain depths inside the concrete was calculated for each condition. Subsequently, the optimum combination was determined with respect to radioactive waste reduction, price, and availability, and the total reduced radioactive concrete waste was estimated. Results and Discussion: In the specific conditions considered in this study, the front wall with respect to the proton beam contained radioactive waste with a depth of up to 64 cm without any additional shield. A single layer of additional shield was inefficient because a thick shield was required. Two-layer combinations comprising 0.1- or 0.4-cm-thick B₄C or Gd₂O₃ behind 10 cm-thick PE were studied to verify whether the appropriate thickness of the additional shield could be maintained. The number of transmitted thermal neutrons reduced to 30% in case of 0.1 cm-thick Gd₂O₃+10 cm-thick PE or 0.1 cm-thick B₄C+10 cm-thick PE. Thus, the thickness of the radioactive waste in the front wall was reduced from 64 to 48 cm. Conclusion: Based on price and availability, the combination of the 10 cm-thick PE+0.1 cmthick B₄C was reasonable and could effectively reduce the number of thermal neutrons. The amount of radioactive concrete waste was reduced by factor of two when considering whole concrete walls of the PET cyclotron vault.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제20권1호
• /
• pp.65-70
• /
• 1988

PWR사용 후 핵연료 집합체 4개를 장전한 수 있는 납/Resin차폐체형 수송용기에 대한 방사선 차폐해석을 수행하였다. 이때 차폐효과를 유지하면서도 전체중량이 최소화되도록 차폐재를 선택하였다. 방사선윈은 ORIGEN 전산코드로 계산하여 얻었으며, 사용후 핵연료의 연소도를 38,000 MWD/MTU 그리고 냉각기간을 3년으로 가정하였다. 수송용기의 외부 표면에서 1m거리에서 나타나는 감마선 그리고 중성자의 선량율은 ANISN전산코드로 계산하여 얻었다. 계산된 총방사선 선량율은 정상 및 가상 사고조건하에서도 국내 법규에 규정된 기준치 이내에서 만족하는 것으로 나타났다.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제45권7호
• /
• pp.951-960
• /
• 2013

Energy group structure has a significant effect on the results of multigroup transport calculations. It is known that $UO_2-PuO_2$ (MOX) is a recently developed fuel which consumes recycled plutonium. For such fuel which contains various resonant nuclides, the selection of energy group structure is more crucial comparing to the $UO_2$ fuels. In this paper, in order to improve the accuracy of the integral results in MOX thermal lattices calculated by WIMSD-5B code, a swarm intelligence method is employed to optimize the energy group structure of WIMS library. In this process, the NJOY code system is used to generate the 69 group cross sections of WIMS code for the specified energy structure. In addition, the multiplication factor and spectral indices are compared against the results of continuous energy MCNP-4C code for evaluating the energy group structure. Calculations performed in four different types of $H_2O$ moderated $UO_2-PuO_2$ (MOX) lattices show that the optimized energy structure obtains more accurate results in comparison with the WIMS original structure.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제52권10호
• /
• pp.2387-2393
• /
• 2020

In this study, a gradient material for shielding neutrons and gamma rays was developed, which consists of epoxy resin, boron carbide (B₄C), lead (Pb) and a little graphene oxide. It aims light weight and compact, which will be applied on the transportable nuclear reactor. The material is made up of sixteen layers, and the thickness and components of each layer were designed by genetic algorithm (GA) combined with Monte Carlo N Particle Transport (MCNP). In the experiment, the viscosities of the epoxy at different temperatures were tested, and the settlement regularity of Pb particles and B₄C particles in the epoxy was simulated by matlab software. The material was manufactured at 25 ℃, the Pb C and O elements of which were also tested, and the result was compared with the outcome of the simulation. Finally, the material's shielding performance was simulated by MCNP and compared with the uniformity material's. The result shows that the shielding performance of gradient material is more effective than that of the uniformity material, and the difference is most noticeable when the materials are 30 cm thick.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제54권2호
• /
• pp.764-769
• /
• 2022

The United Arab Emirates is currently building and operating four units of the APR-1400 developed by a South Korean vendor, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). This paper attempts to perform APR-1400 reactor core analysis by using the well-known two-step method. The two-step method was applied to the APR-1400 first cycle using the open-source nodal diffusion code, KOMODO. In this study, the group constants were generated using CASMO-4 fuel transport lattice code. The simulation was performed in Hot Zero Power (HZP) at steady-state and transient conditions. Some typical parameters necessary for the Nuclear Design Report (NDR) were evaluated in this paper, such as effective neutron multiplication factor, control rod worth, and critical boron concentration for steady-state analysis. Other parameters such as reactivity insertion, power, and fuel temperature changes during the Reactivity Insertion Accident (RIA) simulation were evaluated as well. The results from KOMODO were verified using PARCS and SIMULATE-3 nodal core simulators. It was found that KOMODO gives an excellent agreement.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제53권7호
• /
• pp.2151-2161
• /
• 2021

Nuclear data (ND) sensitivity and uncertainty (S/U) quantification in shielding applications is performed using deterministic and probabilistic approaches. In this paper the validation of the newly developed deterministic program package ASUSD (ADVANTG + SUSD3D) is presented. ASUSD was developed with the aim of automating the process of ND S/U while retaining the computational efficiency of the deterministic approach to ND S/U analysis. The paper includes a detailed description of each of the programs contained within ASUSD, the computational workflow and validation results. ASUSD was validated on two shielding benchmark experiments from the Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive and Database (SINBAD) - the fission relevant ASPIS Iron 88 experiment and the fusion relevant Frascati Neutron Generator (FNG) Helium Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) Test Blanket Module (TBM) mock-up experiment. The validation process was performed in two stages. Firstly, the Denovo discrete ordinates transport solver was validated as a standalone solver. Secondly, the ASUSD program package as a whole was validated as a ND S/U analysis tool. Both stages of the validation process yielded excellent results, with a maximum difference of 17% in final uncertainties due to ND between ASUSD and the stochastic ND S/U approach. Based on these results, ASUSD has proven to be a user friendly and computationally efficient tool for deterministic ND S/U analysis of shielding geometries.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제53권3호
• /
• pp.732-740
• /
• 2021

Scattering resonance of medium mass nuclides leads complex spectrum in the fast reactor, which requires thousands of energy groups in the spectrum calculation. When the broad-group cross sections are collapsed, reaction rate cannot be completely conserved. To eliminate the error from energy collapsing, the Super-homogenization method in energy collapsing (ESPH) was employed in the fast reactor code SARAX. An ESPH factor was derived based on the ESPH-corrected SN transport equation. By applying the factor in problems with reflective boundary condition, both the effective multiplication factor and reaction rate were conserved. The fixed-source iteration was used to ensure the stability of ESPH iteration. However, in the energy collapsing process of SARAX, the vacuum boundary condition was adopted, which was necessary for fast reactors with strong heterogeneity. To further reduce the error caused by leakage, an additional conservation factor was proposed to correct the neutron current in energy collapsing. To evaluate the performance of ESPH with conservation factor, numerical benchmarks of fast reactors were calculated. The results of broad-group calculation agreed well with the direct full-core Monte-Carlo calculation, including the effective multiplication factor, radial power distribution, total control rod worth and sodium void worth.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제54권12호
• /
• pp.4731-4742
• /
• 2022

RBMK fuel assemblies differ from other LWR FA due to a specific arrangement of the fuel rods, the low enrichment, and the used burnable absorber - erbium. Therefore, there is a challenge to adapt modeling tools, developed for other LWR types, to solve RBMK problems. A set of 10 different depletion simulation schemes were tested to estimate the impact on reactivity and spent fuel composition of possible SCALE code options for the neutron transport modelling and the use of different nuclear data libraries. The simulations were performed using cross-section libraries based on both, VII.0 and VII.1, versions of ENDF/B nuclear data, and assuming continuous energy and multigroup simulation modes, standard and user-defined Dancoff factor values, and employing deterministic and Monte Carlo methods. The criticality analysis with burn-up credit was performed for the SFP loaded with RBMK-1500 FA. Spent fuel compositions were taken from each of 10 performed depletion simulations. The criticality of SFP is found to be overestimated by up to 0.08% in simulation cases using user-defined Dancoff factors comparing the results obtained using the continuous energy library (VII.1 version of ENDF/B nuclear data). It was shown that such discrepancy is determined by the higher U-235 and Pu-239 isotopes concentrations calculated.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제55권1호
• /
• pp.378-390
• /
• 2023

The SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) facility, currently under development at Legnaro National Laboratories of INFN, aims at the production of intense RIB (Radioactive Ion Beams) employing the Isotope Separation On-Line (ISOL) technique for interdisciplinary research. The radioactive isotopes of interest are produced by the interaction of a multi-foil uranium carbide target with a 40 MeV 200 μA proton beam generated by a cyclotron proton driver. The Target Ion Source (TIS) is the core of the SPES project, here the radioactive nuclei, mainly neutron-rich isotopes, are stopped, extracted, ionized, separated, accelerated and delivered to specific experimental areas. Due to efficiency reasons, the TIS unit needs to be replaced periodically during operation. In this highly radioactive environment, the employment of autonomous systems allows the manipulation, transport, and storage of the TIS unit without the need for human intervention. A dedicated remote handling infrastructure is therefore under development to fulfill the functional and safety requirement of the project. This contribution describes the layout of the SPES target area, where all the remote handling systems operate to grant the smooth operation of the facility avoiding personnel exposure to a high dose rate or contamination issues.