Criticality Accident Analysis: Does Your Facility's Accident Have a Justified Basis?

摘要

This paper will briefly review the regulatory requirements for justifying (and documenting) a criticality accident in process operations involving significant quantities of fissile material. Then, the bases upon which to make credibility determinations will be explored for fissile materials in different media, different physical arrangements, and different scales of operations. Finally, the case will be argued that the available data from both historical accidents and experimental criticality accident simulations are sufficient to enable the practitioner to accurately evaluate the bounding power history to be expected from a hypothetical accident.