Graduation date: 2006

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005. / Ben T. Zinn, Committee Chair ; Jeff Jagoda, Committee Member ; Suresh Menon, Committee Member ; Tim Lieuwen, Committee Member ; Rick Gaeta, Committee Member. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1971.

Thesis (doctoral)--Technical University of Delft, 2007. / "Gas-cooled fluidized bed nuclear reactor ... (FLUBER)"--P. 3. Includes bibliographical references (p. [139]-148).

No description available.

No description available.

<p>Generation IV (Gen IV) is a developing new generation of nuclear power reactors which is foreseen to bring about a safer and more sustainable production of nuclear power. A Swedish research program called GENIUS aims at developing the Gen IV technology, with emphasis on lead-cooled fast reactors. The present work is part of the GENIUS project, and deals with safeguards aspects for an envisioned future 100 MW Gen IV demonstration facility including storage and reprocessing plant. Also, the safeguards licensing aspects for the facilities have been investigated and results thereof are presented.</p><p>As a basis for the study, the changed usage and handling of nuclear fuel, as compared to that of today, have been examined in order to determine how today's safeguards measures can be modified and extended to meet the needs of the demonstration facility. Safeguards approaches have been considered for within and between each unit at the demonstration facility, with the main focus on system aspects rather than proposing safeguards instrumentation on a detailed level.</p><p>The proposed safeguards approach include the implementation of well-tried measures that are used at currently existing nuclear facilities as well as suggestions for new procedures. The former include, among others, regular inventory verifications, containment and surveillance measures as well as non-destructive and destructive measurements of nuclear materials. The traditional approaches may be improved and supplemented by modern techniques and approaches such as nuclear forensics, safeguards-by-design and improved on-line monitoring of streams of nuclear material. The safeguards approach for the demonstration facility should be outlined early in the licensing process, such that the facility units can be designed in a way that allows for implementation of adequate safeguards measures with minimal intrusion on the regular activities.</p><p>For operating a nuclear facility in Sweden, two separate permits are required. A license application for a new facility shall be handed both to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority and to the environmental court, which in parallel prepare for decisions according to the Nuclear Activities Act and the Environmental Code, respectively. In terms of the Swedish legislation, there are no fundamental differences between Gen IV facilities and currently existing plants. However, comprehensive investigations and evaluations would be required in order to license new Gen IV facilities.</p>

Since the 1990s, researchers around the world have been creating antineutrino detectors for monitoring power reactors. These detectors have been deployed at light water reactors and are able to determine power levels and burn up throughout a fuel cycle. This technology could allow the IAEA to monitor LWRs remotely and unobtrusively to determine if they are operating using normal parameters. Very soon, the next generation of detector will be deployed at a CANDU reactor for a trial operation. While physical observation of these detectors is necessaryl in determining their usefulness, reactor physics simulations have proven to be very accurate in their prediction of detector performance. Since there are many designs still in development, reactor physics simulations are the only way to determine the efficacy of the detector technology. In addition to this, reactor simulations are the best way to evaluate the detector technology to ascertain its usefulness during diversion scenarios. In this research, antineutrino source terms were calculated for a High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor core. These source terms were a function of power level and initial enrichment. SCALE6.1, developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was used to calculate the isotopic inventory in the core as a function of depletion. These fertile and fissile isotopics, along with the fission cross-section and number of antineutrinos emitted per fission, were used to predict the antineutrino source rate for the core. It was found that changing the power yields a linear response from the antineutrino source term. By increasing the power by five percent, the source term also increased by five percent. Substantial changes in the initial enrichment also lead to a detectable change in the antineutrino source term. / Graduation date: 2012

Generation IV (Gen IV) is a developing new generation of nuclear power reactors which is foreseen to bring about a safer and more sustainable production of nuclear power. A Swedish research program called GENIUS aims at developing the Gen IV technology, with emphasis on lead-cooled fast reactors. The present work is part of the GENIUS project, and deals with safeguards aspects for an envisioned future 100 MW Gen IV demonstration facility including storage and reprocessing plant. Also, the safeguards licensing aspects for the facilities have been investigated and results thereof are presented. As a basis for the study, the changed usage and handling of nuclear fuel, as compared to that of today, have been examined in order to determine how today's safeguards measures can be modified and extended to meet the needs of the demonstration facility. Safeguards approaches have been considered for within and between each unit at the demonstration facility, with the main focus on system aspects rather than proposing safeguards instrumentation on a detailed level. The proposed safeguards approach include the implementation of well-tried measures that are used at currently existing nuclear facilities as well as suggestions for new procedures. The former include, among others, regular inventory verifications, containment and surveillance measures as well as non-destructive and destructive measurements of nuclear materials. The traditional approaches may be improved and supplemented by modern techniques and approaches such as nuclear forensics, safeguards-by-design and improved on-line monitoring of streams of nuclear material. The safeguards approach for the demonstration facility should be outlined early in the licensing process, such that the facility units can be designed in a way that allows for implementation of adequate safeguards measures with minimal intrusion on the regular activities. For operating a nuclear facility in Sweden, two separate permits are required. A license application for a new facility shall be handed both to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority and to the environmental court, which in parallel prepare for decisions according to the Nuclear Activities Act and the Environmental Code, respectively. In terms of the Swedish legislation, there are no fundamental differences between Gen IV facilities and currently existing plants. However, comprehensive investigations and evaluations would be required in order to license new Gen IV facilities.

Controlling crystal size distribution (CSD) is important to downstream processing and to product quality. It is well-recognized that selective removal functions can be used to influence CSD, for example by manufacturing a product with a larger dominant size or narrower distribution. Early work on the use of feedback control to manipulate the residence time distribution functions of fines in a continuous crystallizer demonstrated the utility of such an approach in handling process upsets and cycling that resulted from system instability. These efforts were extended to batch crystallization, although there remained significant difficulty associated with on-line analysis of the size distribution. The development of new technologies, such as Focused Beam Reflectance Measurement (FBRM), provides a methodology for on-line monitoring of a representation of the crystal population in either batch or continuous crystallization systems. The FBRM technology is based on laser light scattering; properly installed, it allows on-line determination of the chord length distribution (CLD), which is statistically related to the CSD and depends on the geometry of the crystal. The purpose of the present study is to use the FBRM to monitor the evolution of CSD characteristics and to implement a feedback control scheme that provides the flexibility to move the CSD in a preferred direction. Cooling batch crystallizations of paracetamol has been chosen to investigate implementation of the control scheme. The work will show how fines removal and varying cooling rates provide reliable and practical control of crystal size distribution.