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... In any case, the doses in the accelerator room remain within acceptable values in the case of intrusion inside the room with the reactor in operation. The contribution to the total dose coming from the D-T and D-D fusion nuclear reactions has also been evaluated in [38,39]. This was found to be negligible (several order of magnitude lower) with respect to the contribution coming from the fission source. ...
... This was found to be negligible (several order of magnitude lower) with respect to the contribution coming from the fission source. The detailed results of the radioactive inventory calculations made for the irradiated materials of the VENUS-F core configuration including main building structures (core, lead reflectors, concrete walls) are presented in [39] with some mentioning in [38]. As a conclusion, the shielding analysis has demonstrated that the modification of the VENUS-thermal into VENUS-F does not result into higher doses. ...
In the framework of the European P&T program (IFP6-EUROTRANS), the Generation of Uninterrupted Intense NEutrons pulses at the lead VEnus REactor (GUINEVERE) project consists of an Accelerator Driven System (ADS) that is composed by a fast lead simulated-cooled reactor operated in sub-critical conditions, coupled with an updated version of the GENEPI neutron generator previously used for the MUSE experiments. The GUINEVERE facility aims at developing and improving different techniques for the reactivity monitoring of sub-critical ADS’s. As such, the GUINEVERE project will comprise a series of major experiments that will be performed in the near future. The GUINEVERE facility will be located at the VENUS light water moderated research reactor at the SCK-CEN site of Mol (Belgium), which needs to be modified in order to accommodate a completely different and new type of core. A series of constraints were taken into account in the technical design of the GUINEVERE core, in order to properly conjugate the technical feasibility of this facility and the necessity to comply with the envisioned experimental program and its associated scientific outcome. The complete design study of the GUINEVERE core is the subject of this paper. The final design of the fuel assemblies, safety and control rods is provided. Also, the critical core configuration, to be used as reference for absolute reactivity measurements, is presented along with its associated reactor physics parameters, calculated by means of Monte Carlo methodologies. Finally, for licensing purposes, the GUINEVERE facility must satisfy the required nuclear safety criteria of the Belgian safety authorities, and in this paper, an overview of the safety analysis that has been performed with regard to the core physics, thermal assessment and shielding issues is also provided.
The VENUS-F facility of the GUINEVERE project must satisfy the nuclear safety criteria required by the licensing regulations of the Belgian authority. For this reason, radiation shielding analyses were performed at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK) in the course of nuclear safety assessments in support of the GUINEVERE project. The Monte Carlo (MC) MCNP5 model was developed in accordance with the current design of the VENUS-F fast lead reactor. The reactor was assumed to operate on 500-W fission power, which is called zero power, with accelerator-driven system (ADS)-related experimental aims. The MC variance reduction techniques, such as particle splitting, Russian roulette, weight windows, and point detectors, were applied. To speed up the MCNP calculations, the advantages of message-passing interface parallel computations on FZK's CampusGrid Linux Cluster were employed. The MCNP track-length estimations, point detectors, and the mesh tally super-imposed over the GUINVERE geometry were used in dose rate calculations. The neutron and photon maps of dose equivalent rate were produced in places of possible personnel access inside the reactor control room and on the accelerator room's floor. To obtain the dose equivalent, the neutron and photon fluences were converted by means of ICRP-77 and ANSI/ANS-6.1.1-1977 conversion factors, respectively. The contributions of the D-D and D-T fusion neutron sources to the dose rate fields were estimated. Activation analyses of the lead core and building materials were performed by the FISPACT- 2005 inventory code with the EAF-2005 library to manage the radioactive materials after the series of ADS experiments in the GUINEVERE project. The activity density and shutdown contact dose rate have been calculated. The effect of the impurities in lead on its radioactivity after the VENUS-F campaign was examined.
