Modular Pebble Bed Reactor (MPBR) is a high temperature gas-cooled nuclear power reactor currently under study as a next generation reactor system. In addition to its inherently safe design, a unique feature of this reactor is its multi-pass fuel circulation in which the fuel pebbles are randomly loaded and continuously cycled through the core until they reach their prescribed End-of-Life burn-up limit. Unlike the situation with a conventional light water reactor, depending solely on computational methods to perform in-core fuel management for MPBR will be highly inaccurate. An on-line measurement system is needed to accurately assess whether a given pebble has reached its End-of-Life burn-up limit and thereby provide an on-line, automated go/no-go decision on fuel disposition on a pebble-by-pebble basis. This project investigated approaches to analyzing fuel pebbles in real time using gamma spectroscopy and possibly using passive neutron counting of spontaneous fission neutrons to provide the speed, accuracy, and burn-up range required for burnup determination of MPBR. It involved all phases necessary to develop and construct a burn-up monitor, including a review of the design requirements of the system, identification of detection methodologies, modeling and development of potential designs, and finally, the construction and testing of an operational detector system. Based upon the research work performed in this project, the following conclusions are made. In terms of using gamma spectrometry, two possible approaches were identified for burnup assay. The first approach is based on the measurement of the absolute activity of Cs-137. However, due to spectral interference and the need for absolute calibration of the spectrometer, the uncertainty in burnup determination using this approach was found to range from (almost equal to) "40% at beginning of life to (almost equal to) "10% at the discharge burnup. An alternative approach is to use a relative burnup indicator. In this case, a self-calibration method was developed to obtain the spectrometer's relative efficiency curve based upon gamma lines emitted from 14°La. It was found that the ratio of 239Np/132I can be used in burnup measurement with an uncertainty of (almost equal to) "3% throughout the pebble's lifetime. In addition, by doping the fuel with 6°Co, the use of the 6°Co/134Cs and 239Np/132I ratios can simultaneously yield the enrichment and burnup of each pebble. A functional gamma-ray spectrometry measurement system was constructed and tested with light water reactor fuels. Experimental results were observed to be consistent with the predictions. On using the passive neutron counting method for the on-line burnup measurement, it was found that neutron emission rate of an irradiated pebble is sensitive to its burnup history and the spectral-averaged cross sections used in the depletion calculations; thus a large uncertainty exists in the correlation between neutron emission and burnup. At low burnup levels, the uncertainty in the neutron emission/burnup correlation is too high and neutron emission rate is too low so that it is impossible to determine a pebble's burnup by on-line neutron counting. At high burnup levels, due to the decreasing of the uncertainty in neutron emission rate and the super-linear feature of the correlation, the uncertainty in burnup determination was found to be (almost equal to)7% at the discharge burnup, which is acceptable for determining whether a pebble should be discharged or not. In terms of neutron detection, because an irradiated pebble is a weak neutron source and a much stronger gamma source, neutron detector system should have high neutron detection efficiency and strong gamma discrimination capability. Of all the commonly used neutron detectors, the He-3 and BF3 detector systems were found to be able to satisfy the requirement on detection efficiency; but their gamma discrimination capability is only marginal for this on-line application. Even with thick gamma shielding, these two types of detectors shall deteriorate in performance after a certain period of time of operation. Thus, two or more detector systems must be used alternatively for continuous measurement.

Modular Pebble Bed Reactor (MPBR) is a high temperature gas-cooled nuclear power reactor. In addition to its inherently safe design, a unique feature of this reactor is its multi-pass fuel circulation in which the fuel pebbles are randomly loaded and continuously cycled through the core until they reach their prescribed End-of-Life burnup limit. Unlike the situation with a conventional light water reactor, depending solely on computational methods to perform in-core fuel management for MPBR will be highly inaccurate. An on-line measurement system is needed to accurately assess whether a given pebble has reached its End-of-Life burnup limit and thereby provide an on-line, automated go/no-go decision on fuel disposition on a pebble-by-pebble basis. This project investigated the feasibility of using the passive neutron counting and active neutron/gamma counting for the on line fuel burnup measurement for MPBR. To investigate whether there is a correlation between neutron emission and fuel burnup, the MPBR fuel depletion was simulated under different irradiation conditions by ORIGEN2. It was found that the neutron emission from an irradiated pebble increases with burnup super-linearly and reaches to 10 4 neutron/sec/pebble at the discharge burnup. The photon emission from an irradiated pebble was found to be in the order of 10 13 photon/sec/pebble at all burnup levels. Analysis shows that the neutron emission rate of an irradiated pebble is sensitive to its burnup history and the spectral-averaged one-group cross sections used in the depletion calculations, which consequently leads to large uncertainty in the correlation between neutron emission and burnup. At low burnup levels, the uncertainty in the neutron emission/burnup correlation is too high and the neutron emission rate is too low so that it is impossible to determine a pebble2s burnup by on-line neutron counting at low burnup levels. At high burnup levels, the uncertainty in the neutron emission rate becomes less but is still large in quantity. However, considering the super-linear feature of the correlation, the uncertainty in burnup determination was found to be ̃7% at the discharge burnup, which is acceptable. Therefore, total neutron emission rate of a pebble can be used as a burnup indicator to determine whether a pebble should be discharged or not. The feasibility of using passive neutron counting methods for the on-line burnup measurement was investigated by using a general Monte Carlo code, MCNP, to assess the detectability of the neutron emission and the capability to discriminate gamma noise by commonly used neutron detectors. It was found that both He-3 and BF 3 detector systems are able to satisfy the requirement on detection efficiency; but their gamma discrimination capability is only marginal.