Experimental investigation on probability distribution of neutron counts in a nuclear reactor

The objective of this study was to determine experimentally a probability distribution of neutron counts in nuclear reactors. In a subcritical state of the Utr-Kinki, a series of time sequence count data from a neutron counter was acquired to obtain some frequency histograms of neutron counts. Then the applicability of several probability distributions to the measured histogram was examined by a chi-square test. This examination showed that only the negative binomial distribution was judged to be much acceptable over a certain gate-width range required by the Feynman-α analysis for a thermal reactor system. (Author)