The AFR concept is being developed at Argonne National Laboratory, as an extension of earlier work done on the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). That work was undertaken specifically to resolve some pressing technical issues in safety, waste management, nonproliferation, and economics. Also important, however, was the fundamental fact that the efficient utilization of uranium resources is crucial to...

In some nuclear reactors the core is cooled by means of liquid metal alloy, for example, lead-bismuth eutectic alloy. For safety and licensing reasons, an imaging method for evaluation of status of the interior of reactor has thus to be developed. There are no any other physical means except ultrasonic, which would enable to inspect inner reactor parts submerged in the opaque hot liquid metal. ...

1. Introduction The modular program system KAPROS [1] has been developed in the research centre Karlsruhe for nuclear reactor investigations for more than 30 years. Although in the beginning it also was a main objective to include codes for thermal hydraulic calculations , for safety analysis, for transient analysis, etc., up to few years ago mainly modules for neutron physics calculations were...

We present FBDTestMeasurer, an automated test coverage measurement tool for function block diagram (FBD) programs which are increasingly used in implementing safety critical systems such as nuclear reactor protection systems. We have defined new structural test coverage criteria for FBD programs in which dataflow-centric characteristics of FBD programs were well reflected. Given an FBD program ...

A collaboration between the University of Florida and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) has been formed to develop and validate detailed coupled multiphysics models of the zero-power (100 W) CROCUS reactor at EPFL and the 100 kW University of Florida Training Reactor, for the comprehensive analysis of the reactor behavior under transient (neutronic or thermal-hydraulic ...

There are many introductory hazard analyses (HazAn) of engineered system designs to be found in safety textbooks. A pressure vessel with relief system is considered in [KamHas99]. A pressure vessel is also the first example in [KumHen96], which then includes a small «motor overheating» example and follows with a running example of a pressurised-water reactor, interspersed with a small example o...

We show a new system named AZCATL-CRP to design full power control rod patterns in BWRs. Azcatl-CRP uses an ant colony system and a reactor core simulator for this purpose. Transition and equilibrium cycles of Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant (LVNPP) reactor core in Mexico were used to test Azcatl-CRP. LVNPP has 109 control rods grouped in four sequences and currently uses control cell core (CC...

The Sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) features a closed fuel cycle for efficient conversion of fertile uranium and management of minor actinides. A full actinide-recycle fuel cycle is envisioned with two major options: One involves intermediatesized (150 to 500 MWe) sodium-cooled fast reactors with uranium-plutonium-minor-actinidezirconium metal alloy fuel, supported by a fuel cycle based on pyr...

Exothermic batch reactions are highly nonlinear and complex processes. During the mixing of the chemical reactants, a sudden and unpredictable heat is released causing exothermic reaction. As a result, the runaway reaction may affect the product quality and pose safety problem to the system. Therefore, it is crucial to control the reactor temperature during the process. Often, good controller r...

Instrumentation and control (I&C) is a key element to research reactor (RR) safety responsible for control actions involving startup, power regulation and shutdown as well as abnormal condition management. Unfortunately, system obsolescence that is frequently accompanied by spare part unavailability may result in operational problems and extended reactor shutdown periods. In addition, novel req...