Technical safety evaluation report of Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor

The DOE Office of Health and Environmental Research has requested Los Alamos to review the BMRR and to document its findings in this report. Aftervisiting the BMRR and reviewing documentation, the review team concludes that the reactor facility is being operated in a safe and proper manner. BNL management plays an active role in ensuring safety in the operation. There were some areas where more attention is needed: addition of shielding to the charcoal filter banks and their remote removal in case of high contamination, measuing coolant velocity per element/channel, and improvements in control room console incorporating man-machine design criteria. The Halon gas should also be replaced when a suitable replacement gas is developed. Since it was difficult to obtain the information for calculating the average core heat flux and burnout heat flux for both fuel element types, those information should be consolidated into one document with the equations. There were other deficiencies in documentation and in defining the dose equivalent rate. In Chapter 10 of this report, Los Alamos used dose conversion units considerably different from those used in the early 1970s and based on ICRP 30; these units reduce considerably the calculated doses, whole-body and thyroid determined, from the release of fission products