• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.549-558
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• 2004

TTo comply with increasingly strict regulations for protection against radiation exposure, many nuclear power plants have been working ceaselessly to reduce and control both the radiation sources within power plants and the radiation exposure experienced by operational and maintenance personnel. Many research studies have shown that deposits of irradiated corrosion products on the surfaces of coolant systems are the main cause of occupational radiation exposure in nuclear power plant. These corrosion product deposits on the fuel-clad surface are also known to be main factors in the onset of axial offset anomaly (AOA). Hence, there is a great deal of ongoing research on water chermistry and corrosion processes. In this study, a magnetic filter with permanent magnets was devised to remove the corrosion products in the coolant stream by taking advantage of the magnetic properties of the corrosion products demonstrated a removal efficiency of over 90% for particles above 5${\mu}m$. This finding led to the construction of an electromagnetic device that causes the metallic particulates to flocculate into larger aggregates of about 5${\mu}m$ in diameter by using a novel application of electromagnetic flocculation on radioactive corrosion products.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.385-390
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• 2005

The effect of the Wolsong Tritium Removal Facility on the change of tritium concentration in the soil water was assessed by introducing a dynamic compartment model. For the mathematical modeling, the tritium in the environment was thought to come from two different sources. Three global tritium cycling models were compared with the natural background concentration. The dynamic compartment model was used to model the behavior of the tritium from the nuclear power plants at the Wolsong site. The source term for the dynamic compartment model was calculated with the dry and wet deposition rates. The area around the Wolsong nuclear power plants was represented by the compartments. The mechanisms considered in deriving the transfer coefficients between the compartments were evaporation, runoff, infiltration, hydrodynamic dispersion, and groundwater flow. We predicted what the change of the tritium concentration around the Wolsong nuclear power plants would be after future operation of the tritium removal facility to show the applicability of the model. The results showed that the operation of the tritium removal facility would reduce the tritium concentration in topsoil water quickly.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.207-220
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• 2005

Nuclear power plants (NPP) are complex socio-technological systems that rely on the success of both hardware and human components. Empirical studies of plant operating experience show that human errors are important contributors to accidents and incidents, and that organizational factors play an important role in creating contexts for human errors. Current probabilistic safety assessments (PSA) do not explicitly model the systematic contribution of organizational factors to safety. As some countries, like the United States, are moving towards increased use of risk information in the regulation and operation of nuclear facilities, PSA quality has been identified as an area for improvement. The modeling of human errors, and underlying organizational weaknesses at the root of these errors, are important sources of uncertainty in existing PSAs and areas of on-going research. This paper presents a review of research into the following questions: Is there evidence that organizational factors are important to NPP safety? How do organizations contribute to safety in NPP operations? And how can these organizational contributions be captured more explicitly in PSA? We present a few past incidents that illustrate the potential safety implications of organizational deficiencies, some mechanisms by which organizational factors contribute to NPP risk, and some of the methods proposed in the literature for performing root-cause analyses and including organizational factors in PSA.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.8
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• pp.2883-2897
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• 2022

According to the Renewable Energy 3020 Implementation Plan announced in 2017 by the South Korean government, the electricity share of renewable energy will be expanded to 20% of the total electricity generation by 2030. Given the intermittency of electricity generation from renewable energy, realization of such a plan presents challenges to managing South Korea's isolated national electric grid and implies potentially large excess electricity generation in certain situations. The purpose of this study is: 1) to develop a model to accurately simulate the effects of excess electricity generation from renewables which would arise during the transition, and 2) to propose strategies to manage excess electricity generation through effective utilization of domestic electricity generating capabilities. Our results show that in periods of greater PV and wind power, namely the spring and fall seasons, the frequency of excess electricity generation increases, while electricity demand decreases. This being the case, flexible operation of coal and nuclear power plants along with LNG and pumped-storage hydroelectricity can be used to counterbalance the excess electricity generation from renewables. In addition, nuclear energy plays an important role in reducing CO₂ emissions and electricity costs unlike the fossil fuel-based generation sources outlined in the 8th Basic Plan.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.160-166
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• 2024

The inversion of radiation field distribution is of great significance in the decommissioning sites of nuclear facilities. However, the radiation fields often contain multiple mixtures of radionuclides, making the inversion extremely difficult and posing a huge challenge. Many radiation field reconstruction methods, such as Kriging algorithm and neural network, can not solve this problem perfectly. To address this issue, this paper proposes an optimized inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation algorithm for reconstructing the gamma radiation field. The algorithm corrects the difference between the experimental and simulated scenarios, and the data is preprocessed with normalization to improve accuracy. The experiment involves setting up gamma radiation fields of three Co-60 radioactive sources and verifying them by using the optimized IDW algorithm. The results show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the reconstruction result obtained by using the optimized IDW algorithm is 16.0%, which is significantly better than the results obtained by using the Kriging method. Importantly, the optimized IDW algorithm is suitable for radiation scenarios with multiple radioactive sources, providing an effective method for obtaining radiation field distribution in nuclear facility decommissioning engineering.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1998.05b
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• pp.963-966
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• 1998

The KOMAC(KOrea Multi-purpose Accelerator Complex) linac is composed of RFQ(Radio Frequency Quadrupole), CCDTL(Coupled Cavity Drift Tube Linac) and SC(Superconducting)-linac. The required CW output power of RF system is about 25㎿ for 20㎿ proton beam power. Therefore high power RF sources are necessary for cost saving and reliability improvement. The number of klystrons for 0.5 ㎿ at 350MHz and 1 ㎿ at 700MHz are 1 and 31, respectively. In this paper, the design parameters of the klystron system including power supply and energy recovery system are presented.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.3570-3577
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• 2012

Researches on the danger of nuclear power generation, the foundation of the development of national industry and one of the energy sources, as perceived by ordinary citizens, are very important to social acceptance of nuclear power generation. Accordingly, this study intends to understand how ordinary citizens perceive the social risk of nuclear power generation and radiation, and their misconceptions, and to propose ways to improve such perceptions. To achieve these goals, this study analyzed the perceptions of 251 ordinary citizens. The analysis showed that ordinary citizens have vague anxiety and suspicion about the safety of nuclear power generation, and little trust in government-affiliated organizations. The younger they were, the more influential they thought corporations and industries were. The result of this study suggests that the misconceptions of ordinary citizens should be corrected by professors and scientists in university research institutions they trust the most, and their intrinsic perceptions should be changed accordingly.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1996.11a
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• pp.79-84
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• 1996

The robust controller for the nuclear reactor power control system is designed. The reactor model is set up by use of the point kinetics equations and the singly lumped energy balance equations. Since the model is different from the actual plant, the controller which makes the system robust is necessary. The perturbation of the actual plant is investigated with respect to several possible sources of uncertainty. Then the overall system is configured into the two port model and the $H_{\infty}$ controller is designed. The loop shaping and the permissible control rod speed are considered as the design constraints. The designed $H_{\infty}$ controller provides the sufficient margins for the robustness, and the system output as well as the control input satisfy their relevant requirements.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.695-723
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• 2018

Recently, extreme weather due to climate change has become more frequent, and increase of fine dust has worsen air quality in Korea. Therefore, not only negative perception on coal-fired power generation is dominant, but also the social acceptance of nuclear power generation declines. This study aims at deriving consumer preferences on the mid and long term power mix with various energy sources. Willingness to pay for each generation source was estimated and the preference heterogeneity of consumers was examined by using mixed logit and latent class models. Mixed logit estimation results show that the preference heterogeneity of consumers is especially large for the nuclear power relative to renewable or coal energy. According to the estimation results from the latent class model, group 1 prefers renewable energy while group 2 prefers coal energy. Group 3 shows lexicographic preference which means restricted rationality. As for the policy implication, it is necessary to understand the preference heterogeneity of consumer groups in planning the mid to long term power mix.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.387-392
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• 2012

This paper discusses the concept of merging multiple sources of data on the same 2D CAD drawing(s) for power plant operation. It also presents the concepts and tools used in this project.