Power reactor oriented thermal-hydraulic research, from the safety viewpoint, has been dominated over the past thirty years by accident considerations. The postulated loss of coolant accident, and severe accident concerns, have been the focus of world-wide research programs whose cost is undoubtedly measured in excess of a billion dollars. Various actual accidents, notably Three Mile Island and...

Control rods in a nuclear reactor are activated by neutron irradiation. The activity generated will produce a dose around the rod, irrelevant while it is inside the reactor, but significant when the rod is withdrawn from the reactor and placed in a storage pool. This dose is a potential risk for workers in the surrounding area. In previous works, neutron activation and doses have been calculate...

An important goal of nuclear reactor instrumentation is the continuous monitoring of the state of the reactor and the detection of deviations from the normal behaviour at an early stage. Early detection of anomalies enables one to make the necessary steps in order to prevent further damage of nuclear fuel. In the present paper, an on-line core monitoring system is described by means of which bo...

An important requirement for the practical implementation of empirical diagnostic systems is the capability of classifying transients in all plant operational conditions. The present paper proposes an approach based on an ensemble of classifiers for incrementally learning transients under different operational conditions. New classifiers are added to the ensemble where transients occurring in n...

This paper presents a new approach to the use interactive evolutional computing (IEC) for the automatic core design of a boiling water reactor (BWR). In particular, the approach combines the characteristics of both heuristic search and interactive operation. A heuristic search is performed by a population of chromosomes (or agents) in a search space and an interactive operation is performed by ...