Abstract
The Wolsung Nuclear Power Plant in Korea is under IAEA safeguards. During IAEA physical inventory verifications, the Optical Fiber radiation Probe System has been used since 2007 as the official instrument for verification of spent fuel. Its low sensitivity requires excessive time and labor to perform the IAEA safeguard activities and increases the operator load for preparing a dangerous and time-consuming secondary inspection. The objective of this paper is to develop a superior new optical fiber-based scintillation detector to deal with such issues. To increase the sensitivity of the instrument, a new optical fiber-based scintillation detector was developed by combining a p-terphenyl scintillator with a new type of optical fiber. A field test was carried out in the CANDU Wolsung Unit 1 to characterize the performance of the new detector. The field test showed that the OFPS using the new optical fiber-based scintillation detector has at least 100-times higher sensitivity and can also measure even very weak signals not measurable by the existing detector. From the experimental results, we can conclude that the newly developed OFPS detector would increase the effectiveness and efficiency of nuclear safeguards for verification of spent fuel in wet storage pools of CANDU reactors.
Published Version
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