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.

The Pebble Bed Reactor (PBR) is a helium-cooled, graphite-moderated high temperature nuclear power reactor. In addition to its inherently safe design, a unique feature of this reactor is its multipass fuel cycle in which graphite fuel pebbles (of varying enrichment) are randomly loaded and continuously circulated through the core until they reach their prescribed end-of-life burnup limit (8̃0,000-100,000 MWD/MTU). Unlike the situation with conventional light water reactors (LWRs), depending solely on computational methods to perform in-core fuel management will be highly inaccurate. As a result, an on-line measurement approach becomes the only accurate method to assess whether a particular pebble has reached its end-of-life burnup limit. In this work, an investigation was performed to assess the feasibility of passive gamma-ray spectrometry assay as an approach for on-line interrogation of PBR fuel for the simultaneous determination of burnup and enrichment on a pebble-by-pebble basis. Due to the unavailability of irradiated or fresh pebbles, Monte Carlo simulations were used to study the gamma-ray spectra of the PBR fuel at various levels of burnup. A pebble depletion calculation was performed using the ORIGEN code, which yielded the gamma-ray source term that was introduced into the input of an MCNP simulation. The MCNP simulation assumed the use of a high-purity coaxial germanium detector. Due to the lack of one-group high temperature reactor cross sections for ORIGEN, a heterogeneous MCNP model was developed to describe a typical PBR core. Subsequently, the code MONTEBURNS was used to couple the MCNP model and ORIGEN. This approach allowed the development of the burnup-dependent, one-group spectral-averaged PBR cross sections to be used in the ORIGEN pebble depletion calculation. Based on the above studies, a relative approach for performing the measurements was established. The approach is based on using the relative activities of Np-239/I-132 in combination with the relative activities of Cs-134/Co-60 (Co-60 is introduced as a dopant) to yield the burnup and enrichment for each pebble. Furthermore, a direct consequence of the relative approach is the ability to apply a self-calibration scheme using the multiple gamma lines of Ba-La-140 to establish the relative efficiency curve of the HPGe detector. An assessment of the expected uncertainty components in this approach showed that a maximum uncertainty of less than 5% should be feasible. To confirm the above findings, gamma-ray scans were performed on irradiated PULSTAR reactor fuel assemblies at North Carolina Sate University. The measurements used a 40% efficient n-type coaxial HPGe detector connected to an ORTEC DSPECplus digital Gamma-Ray Spectrometer, and a data acquisition computer.

This Safety Guide is intended primarily for use with land based stationary thermal nuclear power plants but it may, in parts, have a wider applicability to other nuclear facilities. It provides recommendations and guidance on the possible format and content of a SAR in support of a request to the State regulatory body for authorization to construct and or operate a nuclear power plant. As such, it contains recommendations on meeting the requirements of Safety guide GS-R-1 "Legal and governmental infrastructure for nuclear, radioactive waste and transport safety" (2000, ISBN 9201008007)