Burnable poisons in the light water reactor design, microburnup experiments and calculations. Part of a coordinated programme on burnup calculations and experiments for thermal reactors

Investigations on Research Agreement N 1519/CF (1.8.1974 - 31.7.1975) entitled ''Burnable poisons in light water reactor design, microburnup experiments and calculations'' were carried out in the frame of the IAEA's coordinated research programme on ''Burn-up calculation and experiments for thermal reactors''. The theoretical and experimental work on application of solid burnable poison used for reduction of the amount of boric acid necessary to control of PWR or to lower the number of control rods needed in a BWR. Solid burnable poisons are needed in present PWR designs for the reduction of the boron acid concentration in order to prevent positive coefficients of reactivity. The special operational conditions of a ship reactor lead to the application of this kind of poison for compensation of almost all burnup reactivity. This strengthens the necessity of a very accurate and many dimensional calculations because an appropriate binding of reactivity has to be kept over the whole cycle time. Several burnup experiments had been run in the 15 MW material test reactor FRG-II. The following devices have been irradiated: poison pins within and without PWR fuel pin lattice segments and fuel pins containing pellets with a poison core. Measurements of reactivity, fluence, fission product concentration have been performed. Methods applied were γ-scanning and neutron pulse, radiography and transmission measurement techniques. Evaluation of the experiments was done by one and two dimensional Ssub(N) transport burnup calculations. In parallel a collision probability transport burnup code for current PWR design work is being developed, the main feature of which is economy in manpower and computer time