Experimental methods for determining the effective neutron multiplication factor of the “Yalina-Thermal” subcritical assembly

To study the kinetics of subcritical systems and determine the optimal conditions for the transmutation of longlived radioactive waste in the neutron spectrum of ADS-systems the “Yalina” research nuclear facility was created at Joint Institute for Power and Nuclear Research – Sosny (Minsk, Belarus). The main safety indicator of a subcritical system (active zone reactivity) was measured for a “Yalina-Thermal” assembly via three independent methods: inverse multiplication, probabilistic and impulse ones. For the inverse multiplication method, the neutron flux density was monitored during assembly loading. For a fuel load of 285 EK-10 rods the neutron multiplication was M = 22.3±0.6, and the effective neutron multiplication coefficient was k_eff = 0.9551± 0.0016. The probabilistic method (Feynman-alpha method), based on measuring fluctuations in the neutron density level within a system with a fission chain reaction, gave the ratio of the variance to the average counting rate value D/n = 1.779±0.005, which corresponds to k_eff = 0.9597 ±0.0003. The pulse method is aimed at studying the neutron flux behavior of after the neutron pulse injection into the breeding system. Measurements were held with the same setup, used in the Feynman-alpha method. The measured decay constant of instantaneous neutrons is α = –670±0.7 1/s, which corresponds to keff = 0.9560±0.0001. The effective multiplication factor k_eff of the subcritical assembly “Yalina-Thermal”, obtained via three different independent methods, is around average value of k_eff = 0.9569 ± 0.0018. The methods considered can be used for subcritical level monitoring for ADS-systems and research nuclear facilities.

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