Part 1. Fuel-Motion Diagnostics in Support of Fast-Reactor Safety Experiments. Part 2. Fission Product Detection System in Support of Fast Reactor Safety Experiments

摘要

In all destructive fast-reactor safety experiments at TREAT, fuel motion and cladding failure have been monitored by the fast-neutron/gamma-ray hodoscope, providing experimental results that are directly applicable to design, modeling, and validation in fast-reactor safety. Hodoscope contributions to the safety program can be considered to fall into several groupings: pre-failure fuel motion, cladding failure, post-failure fuel motion, steel blockages, pretest and posttest radiography, axial-power-profile variations, and power-coupling monitoring. High-quality results in fuel motion have been achieved, and motion sequences have been reconstructed in qualitative and quantitative visual forms. A collimated detection system has been used to observe fission products in the upper regions of a test loop in the TREAT reactor. Particular regions of the loop are targeted through any of five channels in a rotatable assembly in a horizontal hole through the biological shield. A well-type neutron detector, optimized for delayed neutrons, and two GeLi gamma ray spectrometers have been used in several experiments. Data are presented showing a time history of the transport of Dn emitters, of gamma spectra identifying volatile fission products deposited as aerosols, and of fission gas isotopes released from the coolant. (ERA citation 12:016014)