Speaker
Description
The renewed interest in nuclear power as clean energy source is fueled by the development of a new generation of advanced reactor concepts focused on compact and modular designs. These small modular reactors (20 to 300 MWe) and microreactors (1 to 20 MWe) are designed to enable flexibility and scalability for deployment, which increases their marketability while maintaining the promise of enhanced safety common to larger advanced reactor concepts. Additionally, depending on the application, extended operations with minimal maintenance, a higher level of autonomy and transportability are desired. These requirements present new challenges to the design of instrumentation and control systems, particularly so for the essential function of reactor power monitoring and control.
The US Department of Energy, Advanced Sensor and Instrumentation program addresses many of these new challenges by performing research activities for the development of instrumentation and monitoring processes that support advanced reactors operation. Performance improvement with respect to commercial technology used in the current fleet also include extended temperature range and the need for discrimination of neutron energy, which are shared with other advanced reactor concepts. However, size constraint, autonomous operation and remote deployment must also be taken into consideration for compact and modular designs. This work reports on outcomes of research activities on the development of in-core, high temperature neutron flux sensors, their spectral calibration with metrology processes based on dosimetry and their integration with commercial ex-core detectors as part of power reconstruction methods for reactor control. Results are collected from demonstration experiments in several Universities research reactors (the Ohio State University Research Reactor, the Texas A&M Testing, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics Reactor and Purdue University Reactor One) and the Microreactor Automatic Control System at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The following topics will be discussed in detail:
• Assessment of the performance of self-powered neutron detectors at temperatures up to 850 C and development of related neutron energy spectrum unfolding methods.
• Development of physics-based models for self-powered neutron detectors and the assessment of their impact on reactor power synthesis.
• Development of a data-driven approach for reconstructing core power distribution using ex-core sensors.
• Demonstrate spectral calibration and power reconstruction methods using the non-nuclear prototype of the MARVEL microreactor.
