[en] En 2011, Mexico won the Colombian international tender for the renewal of instrumentation and control of the IAN-R1 Reactor, to Argentina and the United States. This paper presents the design criteria and the development made for the new digital control system installed in the Colombian nuclear reactor IAN-R1, which is based on a redundant and diverse architecture, which provides increased availability, reliability and safety in the reactor operation. This control system and associated instrumentation met all national export requirements, with the safety requirements established by the IAEA as well as the requirements demanded by the Colombian Regulatory Body in nuclear matter. On August 20, 2012, the Colombian IAN-R1 reactor reached its first criticality controlled with the new system developed at Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares (ININ). On September 14, 2012, the new control system of the Colombian IAN-R1 reactor was officially handed over to the Colombian authorities, this being the first time that Mexico exported nuclear technology through the ININ. Currently the reactor is operating successfully with the new control system, and has an operating license for 5 years. (Author)

[en] A brief description of the radiological applications available with high intensity radiation sources is made, preceded by a short historical review of the gamma irradiation plant of the Instituto de Asuntos Nucleares. The most important researches carried out, the services given to industry, hospitals, universities and infrastructure are mentioned. Finally, some of the publications realized in the last years are summarized

[en] This paper describes the thermal power calibration and neutron flux measurement performed in order to have an approach to the IAN-R1 reactor core characterization in the framework of the recently acquired operating license for five years. (author)

[en] The associated Instrumentation & Control of the Research Nuclear Reactor IAN-R1, located in Colombia, was updated on the year 2012, as a direct result of the initiative by the Colombian Government represented by the Colombian Geological Survey (Servicio Geológico Colombiano). The result of the conversion from Highly-enriched MTR Nuclear fuel into Low-enrichment TRIGA Nuclear fuel guarantees a nuclear reactor that can be operated for several years. The present document presents the Current Technical Status (status of available infrastructure and utilization capabilities, including staff) of the reactor, its success stories, major achievements, and future prospects. (author)

[en] The rapid technical development of Colombia over the past years, resulted among others, a considerable increase in the number of measuring instrumentation and testing laboratories, scientific research and metrology centers, in industry, agriculture, public health, education on the nuclear field, etc. IAN is a well organized institution with qualified management, trained staff and reasonably equipped laboratories to carry out tasks as: Metrology, standardization, quality control and maintenance and repair of nuclear instruments. The government of Colombia has adopted a policy to establish and operate through the country maintenance and repair facilities for nuclear instrumentation. This policy is reflected in the organization of electronic laboratories in Bogota-IAN

[en] Due to the obsolescence of the instrumentation and control system of the nuclear research reactor IAN-R1, the Institute of Geology and Mining of Colombia, IngeoMinas, launched an international convoking for renewal it which was won by the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares (ININ). Within systems to design, the reactor protection system is described as important for safety, because this carried out, among others two primary functions: 1) ensuring the reactor shutdown safely, and 2) controlling the interlocks to protect against operational errors if defined conditions have not been met. To fulfill these functions, the various subsystems related to the safety report the state in which they are using binary signals and are connected to the inputs of two redundant logic wiring circuits called action logics (Al) that are part of the reactor protection system. These Al also serve as logical interface to indicate at all times the status of subsystems, both the operator and other systems. In the event that any of the subsystems indicates a state of insecurity in the reactor, the Al generate signals off (or scram) of the reactor, maintaining the interlock until the operator sends a reset signal. In this paper the design, implementation, verification and testing of circuits that make up the Al 1 and 2 of IAN-R1 reactor is described, considering the fulfillment of the requirements that the different international standards imposed on this type of design. (Author)

[en] A distribution was obtained for the thermal neutron flux in the MTR-type fuel elements of the IAN-R1 research nuclear reactor. The flux mapping was carried out with the detector activation technique with the use of Au-197 leaves. The power generated by each fuel element and by the nucleus was determined. Similarly, using the same procedure, the thermal neutron flux was found in the location of the neutron detectors for the control and safety instrumentation used for the operation of the nuclear reactor. This measurement allowed us to diagnose the operating performance of this equipment

[en] This document presents a historical description of the nuclear research reactor IAN-R1. A contextualization is made about the origin of the reactor within the framework of the Atoms for Peace program, including the technical characteristics and the initial configuration of the core, which was replaced by nuclear fuel MTR technology (90 %) to a new fuel type TRIGA (20 %) (acronyms of material testing reactor and training, research, isotopes, general atomics respectively). In the same way, the characteristics of the two modernization that have been made to the instrumentation and control are presented, the first oriented to the installation of three nuclear channels two of wide range and one power channel, renovation of the control console and the installation of the data acquisition system (DAC) cabinet. The second modernization, which corresponds to the new instrumentation and control of the reactor, is oriented to the change of the control console which supports the control and supervision servers, a nuclear channel NP-1000, printer, four screens of the human interface machine HMI, keyboard of the bar handling system and two keyboards for each of the servers. In addition, the DAC was replaced by the instrumentation cabinet, which includes the reactor protection systems, the redundant control system and the supervision system. The instrumentation and control is characterized by the use of the Ethernet standard to achieve inter-connectivity of the systems, programming of the human machine interface (HMI) using open source code Java, and multi platform, logical separation of functions plying concepts of distributed control and modularity, redundancy, unique failure criteria and independence. The use of the reactor is shown, referring to the irradiation facilities available for irradiation of materials to be studied using the neutron activation analysis (NAA) technique. Likewise, irradiation is planned to support the use of the fission fingerprint dating technique, research and support to educational institutions through technical conferences and a visit to the nuclear facility.

[en] The program to modernize IAN-R1 research reactor control and safety instrumentation has been carried out considering two main aspects: updating safety philosophy requirements and acquiring the newest reactor control instrumentation controlled by computer, following the present criteria internationally recognized, for safety and reliable reactor operations and the latest developments of nuclear electronic technology. The new IAN-R1 reactor instrumentation consist of two wide range neutron monitoring channels, commanded by microprocessor a data acquisition system and reactor control, (controlled by computers). The reactor control desk is providing through two displays; all safety and control signals to the reactor operators; furthermore some signals like reactor power, safety and period signals are also showed on digital bar graphics, which are hard wired directly from the neutron monitoring channels

[en] For some time the resins of ionic exchange were used for the chemical purification of water. Resins that have double function, are of special interest. They contain a cartridge, ionic channel and cationic channel. Cartridges with mixed channel resins for ionic exchange are used for purification of water in the IAN-R-1 reactor pool. After some time, cartridges lose their ionic exchange capacity and they must be replaced. This investigation is dealing with synthetic resins for ionic exchange, and focuses on standardisation of a method for separation of mixed channels. Favourable conditions were determined for the separation method and recovery of worn-out cartridges of resins for ionic exchange of mixed channel 'Barnstead supercartridges' for water purification