Pretreatment of primary system components using preoxidation

Radiation-level buildup in light water reactor systems has become of increasing concern to operating utilities. Occupational exposure reduction through engineering, administrative, and regulatory procedures has proven to be cost-effective. For both BWR and PWR systems, the preoxidation of stainless steel surfaces has been shown to be a very cost-effective method for significantly reducing the out-of-core radiation levels, thereby keeping occupational exposure ALARA. Specifically, the occupational exposure reduction in a BWR that used the preoxidation technique saved 120 person-rem in a recent extended plant outage. This represented a reduction > 50% for the maintenance work in the primary contaminant