The objective of this thesis is to determine and analyze the dose rate to personnel throughout the proposed IRIS nuclear power plant. To accomplish this objective, complex models of the IRIS plant have been devised, advanced transport theory methods employed, and computationally intense simulations performed.
IRIS is an advanced integral, light water reactor with a 335 MWe expected power output (1000 MWth). Due to its integral design, the IRIS pressure vessel has a large downcomer region. The large downcomer and the neutron reflector provide a great deal of additional shielding. This increase in shielding ensures that the IRIS design easily accomplishes the regulatory dose limits for radiation workers. However, The IRIS project set enhanced objectives of further reducing the dose rate to significantly lower levels, comparable or below the limit allowed for general public.
The IRIS nuclear power plant design is very compact and has a rather complex geometric structure. Programs that use conventional methods would take too much time or would be unable to provide an answer for such a challenging deep penetration problem. Therefore, the modeling of the power plant was done using a hybrid methodology for automated variance reduction implemented into the MAVRIC sequence of the SCALE6 program package. The methodology is based on the CADIS and FW-CADIS methods. The CADIS method was developed by J.C. Wagner and A. Haghighat. The FW-CADIS method was developed by J.C. Wagner and D. Peplow. Using these methodologies in the MAVRIC code sequence, this thesis shows the dose rate throughout most of the inhabitable regions of the IRIS nuclear power plant. This thesis will also show the regions that are below the dose rate reduction objective set by the IRIS shielding team.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/37123 |
| Date | 25 October 2010 |
| Creators | Hartmangruber, David Patrick |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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