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Abstract
Heating due to energy deposition of intense ionizing radiation in samples and structural materials of nuclear reactors poses severe limitations in terms of cooling requirements for safe reactor operation, especially in high neutron and gamma flux environments of material testing fission reactors (MTRs) and novel fusion devices. A bilateral CEA-JSI research project was launched in 2018 with the objective to measure the gamma heating rates in standard reactor-related materials (graphite, aluminium, stainless steel and tungsten) as well as fusionrelevant materials (low-activation steel Eurofer-97 and Nb3Sn superconductor) in the JSI TRIGA reactor my means of gamma calorimeters. The calorimeter design will be based on the the CALMOS-2 calorimeter developed at the CEA and used to perform gamma heating measurements in the OSIRIS MTR in Saclay. In order to optimize the detector response inside the JSI TRIGA reactor field and not to perturb the measurement field, a detailed computational analysis was performed in terms of energy deposition assessment and measurement field perturbation using the MCNP v6.1 code, and in terms of heat transfer using the COMSOL Multiphysics code. The abovementioned activities enabled us to finalize the detector design with the experimental campaign planned for the end of year 2019.
Highlights
During operation of fission and fusion reactors, high levels of ionizing radiation are produced
In case of thermal fission reactors it is desirable for the neutrons to thermalize in the coolant, which is comprised of low atomic mass materials. This in turn means that the gamma field is not significantly attenuated by the reactor coolant, but rather in reactor structural and sample materials, which leads to their heating and temperature increase
A rigorous computational analysis of the radiation transport and heat transfer has been performed in order to optimize the nuclear heating calorimeter sensor for use inside the Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI) TRIGA reactor central channel irradiation facility
Summary
During operation of fission and fusion reactors, high levels of ionizing radiation are produced. In case of thermal fission reactors it is desirable for the neutrons to thermalize in the coolant, which is comprised of low atomic mass materials This in turn means that the gamma field is not significantly attenuated by the reactor coolant, but rather in reactor structural and sample materials, which leads to their heating and temperature increase. Additional gamma heating will represnent an important limitation for fusion devices, as the required plant cooling power is around 100 times larger than the actual cooling power Knowledge of these heating values for neutron and gamma radiation will assist in the mitigation of the abovementioned technical difficulties at the planning stages of a specific experiment or in novel reactor designs.
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