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...

Knowledge of the neutron distribution in a nuclear reactor is necessary to ensure the safe and efficient burnup of reactor fuel. Currently these measurements are performed by in-core systems in what are extremely hostile environments and in most reactor accident scenarios it is likely that these systems would be damaged. Here we present a compact and portable radiation imaging system with the a...

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 core conversion studies of the Ghana Research Reactor Core started in 2006 and with the objective of designing an LEU core with similar operational capabilities as the original HEU core and with acceptable safety margins under both normal and accident conditions. Steadystate studies for converting the Ghana MNSR facility from HEU to LEU core have been performed using the PLTEMP/ANL V4.1 cod...

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) which plays a crucial role in risk evaluation is a quantitative approach intended to demonstrate how a nuclear reactor meets the safety margins as part of the licensing process. Despite PSA merits, some shortcomings associated with the final results exist. Conventional PSA uses crisp values to represent the failure probabilities of basic events. This causes...

The Atominstitute (ATI) of the Vienna University of Technology utilizes a TRIGA Mark II research reactor for last fourty eight years at a nominal reactor power of 250 kW (thermal). It has a completely mixed core and employing three different types of fuels i.e. aluminium clad fuel with 20% enrichment, stainless steel (SS) clad fuel with 20% enrichment and SS clad FLIP fuel with 70% enrichment. ...

The work completed had the following objectives: i) To compute pulse width (full width at half maximum-FWHM) of the power curves for the Three Mile Island Unit 1 Pressurized Water Reactor (TMI-1 PWR) core model in the event of a super-prompt-critical rod ejection accident (REA) at Hot Zero Power (HZP) in the central fuel assembly (Rod 7A) at both EOC and BOC for various control rod worths and d...

BACKGROUND This work presents an initial proposed design of a Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA) facility to be installed at the TRIGA IPR-R1, a 60 years old research reactor of the Centre of Development of Nuclear Technology (CDTN) in Brazil. The basic characteristics of the facility and the results of the neutron flux are presented and discussed. FINDINGS The proposed design is based o...