Kharkov Institute Of Physics And Technology Research Articles

Shielding design and analyses of the cold neutron guide hall for the KIPT neutron source facility

Abstract Argonne National Laboratory of the United States and Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) of Ukraine have cooperated on the development, design, and construction of a neutron source facility. The facility was constructed at Kharkov, Ukraine, and its commissioning process is underway. The facility will be used for researches, producing medical isotopes, and training young nuclear specialists. The neutron source facility is designed with a provision to include a cryogenically cooled moderator system—a cold neutron source (CNS). This CNS provides low-energy neutrons, which will be used in the scattering experiment and material structures analysis. Cold neutron guides, coated with reflective material for the low-energy neutrons, will be used to transport the cold neutrons to the experimental site. The cold neutron guides would keep the cold neutrons within certain energy and angular space concentrated inside, while most of the gamma rays and high-energy neutrons are not affected by the cold neutron guides. For the KIPT design, the cold neutron guides need to extend several meters outside the main shield of the facility, and curved guides will also be used to remove the gamma and high-energy neutron. The neutron guides should be installed inside a shield structure to ensure an acceptable biological dose in the facility hall. Heavy concrete is the selected shielding material because of its acceptable performance and cost. Shield design analysis was carried out for the CNS guide hall. MCNPX was used as the major computation tool for the design analysis, with neutron and gamma dose calculated separately. Weight windows variance reduction technique was also used in the shield design. The goal of the shield design is to keep the total radiation dose below the 5.0 μSv/hr guideline outside the shield boundary. After a series of iterative MCNPX calculations, the shield configuration and parameters of CNS guide hall were determined and presented in this article.

Analysis of fuel management in the KIPT neutron source facility

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) of USA and Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) of Ukraine have been collaborating on the conceptual design development of an experimental neutron source facility consisting of an electron accelerator driven sub-critical assembly. The neutron source driving the sub-critical assembly is generated from the interaction of 100KW electron beam with a natural uranium target. The sub-critical assembly surrounding the target is fueled with low enriched WWR-M2 type hexagonal fuel assemblies. The U-235 enrichment of the fuel material is <20%. The facility will be utilized for basic and applied research, producing medical isotopes, and training young specialists. With the 100KW electron beam power, the total thermal power of the facility is ∼360kW including the fission power of ∼260kW. The burnup of the fissile materials and the buildup of fission products continuously reduce the system reactivity during the operation, decrease the neutron flux level, and consequently impact the facility performance. To preserve the neutron flux level during the operation, the fuel assemblies should be added and shuffled for compensating the lost reactivity caused by burnup. Beryllium reflector could also be utilized to increase the fuel life time in the sub-critical core. This paper studies the fuel cycles and shuffling schemes of the fuel assemblies of the sub-critical assembly to preserve the system reactivity and the neutron flux level during the operation.

Shielding design and analyses of KIPT neutron source facility

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) of USA and Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) of Ukraine have been collaborating on the conceptual design development of a neutron source facility. An electron accelerator drives a sub-critical facility (ADS) is used for generating the neutron source. The facility will be utilized for performing basic and applied nuclear researches, producing medical isotopes, and training young nuclear specialists. Monte Carlo code MCNPX has been utilized as the major design tool for the design, due to its capability to transport electrons, photons, and neutrons at high energies. However the ADS shielding calculations with MCNPX need enormous computational resources and the small neutron yield per electron makes sampling difficulty for the Monte Carlo calculations. The high energy electrons ( E > 100 MeV) generate very high energy neutrons and these neutrons dominant the total radiation dose outside the shield. The radiation dose caused by high energy neutrons is ∼3–4 orders of magnitude higher than that of the photons. However, the high energy neutron fraction within the total generated neutrons is very small, which increases the sampling difficulty and the required computational time. To solve these difficulties, the user subroutines of MCNPX are utilized to generate a neutron source file, which record the generated neutrons from the photonuclear reactions caused by electrons. This neutron source file is utilized many times in the following MCNPX calculations for weight windows (importance function) generation and radiation dose calculations. In addition, the neutron source file can be sampled multiple times to improve the statistics of the calculated results. In this way the expensive electron transport calculations can be performed once with good statistics for the different ADS shielding problems. This paper presents the method of generating and utilizing the neutron source file by MCNPX for the ADS shielding calculation and similar accelerator facilities, and the accurate radiation dose analyses outside the shield using modest computational resources.

Contributions of the “Saturn” to Modern Stellarator-Torsatron Research

It has been 40 years since the startup and first plasma from the Saturn stellarator-torsatron. The l = 3 stellarator-torsatron “Saturn” was the first of a series of torsatron-like devices built in Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) in the 1970s: later appeared “Vint-20”, “U-3”, “U-3M”. The Saturn device was used for comparative investigations on the same device two magnetic configurations in stellarator and torsatron regimes and for experimental examination of their effects on plasma confinement. The thorough measurements of magnetic structure in both regimes demonstrated their high equivalence. Investigations of torsatron without toroidal coils supported the principal possibility to have a spatial divertor configuration, which was later realized in U-3, the first torsatron with a divertor. The results on Saturn, obtained for the first time with a pure torsatron configuration, have opened the prospect for torsatrons to be an alternative to tokamaks in the development of a fusion reactor. After various magnetic configurations were studied, the Saturn device was used for providing investigations of confinement of injected hydrogen plasma and of ECR plasma in different gases. In this paper we summarize the main Saturn results and try to find the bridge between them and the present experiments on existing stellarator-type fusion devices with an aim to see what particular Saturn results were supported by those obtained later.

Production of medical radioactive isotopes using KIPT electron driven subcritical facility

Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) of Ukraine in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has a plan to construct an electron accelerator driven subcritical assembly. One of the facility objectives is the production of medical radioactive isotopes. This paper presents the ANL collaborative work performed for characterizing the facility performance for producing medical radioactive isotopes. First, a preliminary assessment was performed without including the self-shielding effect of the irradiated samples. Then, more detailed investigation was carried out including the self-shielding effect, which defined the sample size and location for producing each medical isotope. In the first part, the reaction rates were calculated as the multiplication of the cross section with the unperturbed neutron flux of the facility. Over fifty isotopes have been considered and all transmutation channels are used including (n, γ), (n, 2n), (n, p), and ( γ, n). In the second part, the parent isotopes with high reaction rate were explicitly modeled in the calculations. Four irradiation locations were considered in the analyses to study the medical isotope production rate. The results show the self-shielding effect not only reduces the specific activity but it also changes the irradiation location that maximizes the specific activity. The axial and radial distributions of the parent capture rates have been examined to define the irradiation sample size of each parent isotope.

Physics analyses of an accelerator-driven sub-critical assembly

Physics analyses have been performed for an accelerator-driven sub-critical assembly as a part of the Argonne National Laboratory activity in preparation for a joint conceptual design with the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) of Ukraine. KIPT has a plan to construct an accelerator-driven sub-critical assembly targeted towards the medical isotope production and the support of the Ukraine nuclear industry. The external neutron source is produced either through photonuclear reactions in tungsten or uranium targets, or deuteron reactions in a beryllium target. KIPT intends using the high-enriched uranium (HEU) for the fuel of the sub-critical assembly. The main objective of this paper is to study the possibility of utilizing low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel instead of HEU fuel without penalizing the sub-critical assembly performance, in particular the neutron flux level. In the course of this activity, several studies have been carried out to investigate the main choices for the system's parameters. The external neutron source has been characterized and a pre-conceptual target design has been developed. Several sub-critical configurations with different fuel enrichments and densities have been considered. Based on our analysis, it was shown that the performance of the LEU fuel is comparable with that of the HEU fuel. The LEU fuel sub-critical assembly with 200-MeV electron energy and 100-kW electron beam power has an average total flux of ∼2.50×10 13 n/s cm 2 in the irradiation channels. The corresponding total facility power is ∼204 kW divided into 91 and 113 kW deposited in the target and sub-critical assemblies, respectively.