Freshly induced short-lived gamma-ray activity as a measure of fission rates in lightly re-irradiated spent fuel

Abstract

A new measurement technique has been developed to determine fission rates in burnt fuel, following re-irradiation in a zero-power research reactor. The development has been made in the frame of the LIFE@PROTEUS program at the Paul Scherrer Institute, which aims at characterizing the interfaces between fresh and highly burnt fuel assemblies in modern LWRs. To discriminate against the high intrinsic gamma-ray activity of the burnt fuel, the proposed measurement technique uses high-energy gamma-rays, above 2000 keV, emitted by short-lived fission products freshly produced in the fuel. To demonstrate the feasibility of this technique, a fresh UO 2 sample and a 36 GWd/t burnt UO 2 sample were irradiated in the PROTEUS reactor and their gamma-ray activities were recorded directly after irradiation. For both fresh and the burnt fuel samples, relative fission rates were derived for different core positions, based on the short-lived 142La (2542 keV), 89Rb (2570 keV), 138Cs (2640 keV) and 95Y (3576 keV) gamma-ray lines. Uncertainties on the inter-position fission rate ratios were mainly due to the uncertainties on the net-area of the gamma-ray peaks and were about 1–3% for the fresh sample, and 3–6% for the burnt one. Thus, for the first time, it has been shown that the short-lived gamma-ray activity, induced in burnt fuel by irradiation in a zero-power reactor, can be used as a quantitative measure of the fission rate. For both fresh and burnt fuel, the measured results agreed, within the uncertainties, with Monte Carlo (MCNPX) predictions.