Abstract. The decommissioning of a light water reactor (LWR), which is licensed under § 7 of the German Atomic Energy Act, following the post-operational phase requires a comprehensive licensing procedure including in particular radiation protection aspects and possible impacts to the environment. Decommissioning includes essential changes in requirements for the systems and components and will mainly lead to the direct dismantling. In this context, neutron induced activation calculations for the structural components have to be carried out to predict activities in structures and to estimate future costs for conditioning and packaging. To avoid an overestimation of the radioactive inventory and to calculate the expenses for decommissioning as accurate as possible, modern state-of-theart Monte-Carlo-Techniques (MCNP™) are applied and coupled with present-day activation and decay codes (ORIGEN-S). In this context ADVANTG is used as weight window generator for MCNP™ i. e. as variance reduction tool to speed up the calculation in deep penetration problems. In this paper the calculation procedure is described and the obtained results are presented with a validation along with measured activities and photon dose rates measured in the post-operational phase. The validation shows that the applied calculation procedure is suitable for the determination of the radioactive inventory of a nuclear power plant. Even the measured gamma dose rates in the postoperational phase at different positions in the reactor building agree within a factor of 2 to 3 with the calculation results. The obtained results are accurate and suitable to support effectively the decommissioning planning process.
Modern theoretical methods for analysing the stability behaviour of Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) are relatively reliable. The analysis is performed by comprehensive validated system codes comprising 3D core models and one-dimensional thermal-hydraulic parallel channel models in the frequency (linearized models) or time domain. Nevertheless the spontaneous emergence of stable or unstable periodic orbits as solutions of the coupled nonlinear differential equations determining the stability properties of the coupled thermal-hydraulic and neutron kinetic (highly) nonlinear BWR system is a surprising phenomenon, and it is worth thinking about the mathematical background controlling such behaviour. In particular the coexistence of different types of solutions, such as the coexistence of unstable limit cycles and stable fixed points, are states of stability, not all nuclear engineers are familiar with. Hence the part I of this paper is devoted to the mathematical background of linear and nonlinear stability analysis and introduces a novel efficient approach to treat the nonlinear BWR stability behaviour with both system codes and so-called (advanced) reduced order models (ROMs). The efficiency of this approach, called the RAM-ROM method, will be demonstrated by some results of stability analyses for different power plants.
In part 1 of this article we explained the partly relative complex solution manifold of the differential equations describing the stability behaviour of a BWR, in particular the coexistence of different types of solutions, such as the coexistence of unstable limit cycles and stable fixed points are of interest from the operational safety point of view. The part 2 is devoted to the surveillance of the stability behaviour. We summarize some stability monitoring methods and suggest to support stability tests by RAM-ROM analyses in order to reveal in advance the stability “landscape” of the BWR in a parameter region high sensitive for appearing of linear unstable states. The analysis of an especial stability test, performed at NPP Leibstadt (KKL), makes it clear that the measurement results can only be interpreted by application of bifurcation analysis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.