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Five Decades of TRIGA Reactors

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Five Decades of TRIGA Reactors Five Decades of TRIGA Reactors Helmuth BÖCK Technische Universität Wien-Atominstitut Stadionallee 2, 1020 Vienna, Austria E-mail: [email protected] Mario VILLA, Robert BERGMANN Technische Universität Wien-Atominstitut Stadionallee 2, 1020 Vienna, Austria [email protected]; [email protected] ABSTRACT In the late 1950’s to the end of the 1960’s, TRIGA1 reactors were mainly commissioned in the US and Europe while later Asian countries as well as Latin America followed. Most of these reactors were used for the training and education of engineers and scientists to develop a national nuclear program, at universities for academic training or at hospitals for radioisotope production. Since the commissioning of the first TRIGA in 1958, a total of 66 TRIGA reactors have been built, some of which were converted from MTR type fuel to TRIGA fuel. The following decades during the 1990’s and beyond are characterized by TRIGA reactors being shut down or decommissioned due to changes in the national nuclear programs, under- utilization or simply lack of funds. In addition, the US fuel return program which started in 1996 put pressure on many TRIGA reactors to return any HEU fuel to the US. In many countries, this program initiated TRIGA shut down processes due to reasons mentioned above. Today 38 TRIGA fueled reactors remain operational. Presently the main concern of the TRIGA community is the continuous supply of TRIGA fuel; it is presently suspended due to necessary post-Fukushima safety and security investments at the fuel factory located at Romans/France. Other concerns are costly refurbishments due to new safety and security requirements, obsolescence of original parts, and underutilization. After a brief history of TRIGA reactors, the paper covers the present situation of the TRIGA community and gives an outlook of problems to be solved during the next decade for further successful TRIGA operation. 1 HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF TRIGA REACTORS The TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotope Production General Atomics) concept has its origins in August 1955, when a large international conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland. One of the two US organizers of that meeting was Frederic de Hoffman, a nuclear physicist employed by General Dynamics Corporation in San Diego, California, USA. 1 TRIGA is a registered trademark of General Atomics (USA) 104.1 104.2 After the conference, de Hoffman convinced General Dynamics that it was time for the commercial development of nuclear reactors and nuclear energy. General Dynamics responded by creating the General Atomic Division in 1956 (now known as General Atomics, GA), with de Hoffman as its first president. In June of 1956, then General Atomic Division of General Dynamics convened a group of scientists, to design a ‘safe reactor’ which must be one that “could be given to a bunch of high school children to play with, without any fear that they would get hurt”. The reactor fuel itself should have inherent safety characteristics even for fast reactivity insertion events. This special feature is enabled due to the large prompt negative temperature coefficient of reactivity of the UZrHn fuel. The prototype reactor, named TRIGA Mark I, achieved first criticality on 3 May 1958 at the General Atomic division’s new facilities in La Jolla, near San Diego, California, USA. In 1964, full patents on the TRIGA reactor were granted to its early designers [1], [2]. Over the years several TRIGA fuel types that differ in cladding, enrichment, weight percent uranium, size, and burnable poisons were developed. In total 66 TRIGA research reactors (RRs) have been constructed in 23 countries and by September 2016, 38 RRs are still in operation. The prototype TRIGA reactor at General Atomics in San Diego was closed down permanently in 1995 and was previously designated by the American Nuclear Society in 1986 as a Nuclear Historic Landmark. The citation highlighted its role in pioneering the use of unique, inherently safe capabilities in nuclear reactors. A second TRIGA, at the University of Illinois (now decommissioned) also received this distinction in 2016 for its pioneering work. 2 THE TRIGA CONCEPT [3], [4] The TRIGA reactor was developed and offered to customers in several standard designs. The below-ground TRIGA Mark I reactor is extremely simple in its physical construction. It has a graphite-reflected core installed near the bottom of an aluminium tank and typically operates at power levels up to 1 MW with pulsing capability typically to 1000 MW and average in-core thermal flux levels of 1E+13 neutrons/cm2s. Surrounding earth and demineralized water provide most of the required radial and vertical shielding. No special containment or confinement building is necessary and installation in existing buildings has often been possible. Core cooling is adequately achieved just through natural convection. Each Mark I reactor is equipped with various irradiation facilities including a central thimble for high-flux irradiations, pneumatic rabbit with in-core terminus, and a rotary specimen rack for uniform irradiations of up to 80 sample containers. The above-ground TRIGA Mark II reactor has a core that is identical to that of the Mark I but is located in a pool surrounded by a concrete biological shield that is above the reactor room floor level. The pool water provides natural convection cooling for operation up to 2 MW, or up to 3 MW with a down-flow forced cooling. In addition to the Mark I’s irradiation facilities, the Mark II includes four horizontal beam ports extending through the concrete shield to the surface of the reflector, and a graphite thermal column providing a source of well-thermalized neutrons suitable for physical research or biological irradiations. In the early TRIGA Mark II reactors, a separate thermalizing column was included together with an associated water-filled pool for shielding studies. In recent times, users have converted these for other applications, such as dry neutron radiography facilities with built-in shielding. More Proceedings of the International Conference Nuclear Energy for New Europe, Portorož, Slovenia, September 5-8, 2016 104.3 recent versions of the Mark II TRIGA reactor have not included the thermalizing column and pool. A later design option, the TRIGA Mark III provided a movable reactor core, supporting both steady-state (up to 2 MW) and pulsing operations, but with greatly increased operational flexibility. The core can be moved to one end of the pool for experiments in an adjacent dry, walk-in exposure room or to the opposite end for experiments involving the thermal columns and beam ports, or used in the centre of the pool for isotope production and other applications. Special purpose TRIGA reactors have also been built. These include: • The dual core TRIGA reactor in Romania, licensed at 14 MW, is the highest power TRIGA built (GA has designed TRIGA reactors to power levels of 25 MW) and is primarily employed for power reactor fuel testing. The dual core feature includes a second annular core that pulses to 22 GW. A similar annular core pulsing reactor was constructed at Tokai Mura, Japan, which has been extensively used for transient testing of LWR fuels. • The 2 MW TRIGA reactor now operated by University of California-Davis was originally designed and constructed for the U.S. Air Force, equipped with unique robotic and neutron camera facilities to conduct real-time neutron radiography for detecting corrosion in military aircraft wings. • The last TRIGA to be constructed near Rabat, Morocco is a 2 MW TRIGA Mark II, commissioned in 2007, and including built-in forced cooling features that would allow a future upgrade to 3 MW. Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems for all new TRIGA reactors have now evolved into compact, microprocessor-driven systems. As with previous generations of the I&C systems, they are designed to enable inexperienced students and non-technical personnel to operate the reactor with a minimum of training, with simplicity afforded as a result of the inherently safe characteristics derived from the physical properties of the UZrH fuel. Four operating modes are typically available: manual, automatic, pulsing, and “square wave,” the latter being a one-button start-up sequence for bringing the reactor up quickly (a few seconds) to its operating steady-state power level. TRIGA reactors have also been licensed to operate in unattended mode, again as a result of the protection afforded by the safety characteristics of the UZrH fuel. 3 THE TRIGA COMMUNITY In February 1970 the first US TRIGA Users Conference took place in Denver/Colorado followed by the First European TRIGA Users Conference in Otaniemi/Finland with a large number of overseas participants from the USA and Asia as well as representatives from General Atomics. At this conference topics such as reactor operation, experience with reactor systems, reactor utilization and safety issues were discussed. These regular TRIGA meetings were continued on a two-year basis both in the USA and in Europe. While the US TRIGA Proceedings of the International Conference Nuclear Energy for New Europe, Portorož, Slovenia, September 5-8, 2016 104.4 Conference was later on embedded into the US-TRTR Conference, the European TRIGA conference continued up to 2008. Due to lack of participation, the European TRIGA Users Conference was then embedded into the annual Research Reactor Fuel Management conference (RRFM) where the TRIGA community met in a side event to discuss common problems. The subjects were mainly fuel procurement and fuel back-end, topics which were of high interest for all TRIGA reactors. As of September 2016 in Europe only 7 TRIGA reactors (Mainz, Vienna, Ljubljana, Pitesti, Roma, Pavia and Istanbul) were in operation; the TRIGA contacts nowadays rely mainly on personal, direct contacts among the TRIGA operators as they know each other since many years.
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