Identification and categorisation of safety issues for ESNII reactor concepts. Part I: Common phenomena related to materials

International audience; With the aim to develop a joint proposal for a harmonised European methodology for safety assessment of advanced reactors with fast neutron spectrum, SARGEN-IV (Safety Assessment for Reactors of Gen IV) Euratom coordination action project gathered together twenty-two partners' safety experts from twelve EU Member States. The group consisted of eight European Technical Safety Organisations involved in the European Technical Safety Organisation Network (ETSON), European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), system designers, industrial vendors as well as research and development (RandD) organisations. To support the methodology development, key safety features of four fast neutron spectrum reactor concepts considered in Deployment Strategy of the Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform (SNETP) were reviewed. In particular, outcomes from running European Sustainable Nuclear Industrial Initiative (ESNII) system projects and related Euratom collaborative projects for Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors, Lead-cooled Fast Reactors, Gas-cooled Fast Reactors, and the lead-bismuth eutectic cooled Fast Spectrum Transmutation Experimental Facility were gathered and critically assessed. To allow a consistent build-up of safety architecture for the ESNII reactor concepts, the safety issues were further categorised to identify common phenomena related to materials. Outcomes of the present work also provided guidance for the identification and prioritisation of further RandD needs respective to the identified safety issues. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-NDlicense

A Fine-Grained Random Forests using Class Decomposition

Class decomposition describes the process of segmenting each class into a number of homogeneous subclasses. This can be naturally achieved through clustering. Utilising class decomposition can provide a number of benefits to supervised learning, especially ensembles. It can be a computationally efficient way to provide a linearly separable dataset without the need for feature engineering required by techniques like Support Ve]ctor Machines (SVM) and Deep Learning. For ensembles, the decomposition is a natural way to increase diversity; a key factor for the success of ensemble classifiers. In this paper, we propose to adopt class decomposition to the state-of-the-art ensemble learning Random Forests. Medical data for patient diagnosis may greatly benefit from this technique, as the same disease can have a diverse of symptoms. We have experimentally validated our proposed method on a number of datasets in that are mainly related to the medical domain. Results reported in this paper shows clearly that our method has significantly improved the accuracy of Random Forests

Intraperitoneal drain placement and outcomes after elective colorectal surgery: international matched, prospective, cohort study

Despite current guidelines, intraperitoneal drain placement after elective colorectal surgery remains widespread. Drains were not associated with earlier detection of intraperitoneal collections, but were associated with prolonged hospital stay and increased risk of surgical-site infections.Background Many surgeons routinely place intraperitoneal drains after elective colorectal surgery. However, enhanced recovery after surgery guidelines recommend against their routine use owing to a lack of clear clinical benefit. This study aimed to describe international variation in intraperitoneal drain placement and the safety of this practice. Methods COMPASS (COMPlicAted intra-abdominal collectionS after colorectal Surgery) was a prospective, international, cohort study which enrolled consecutive adults undergoing elective colorectal surgery (February to March 2020). The primary outcome was the rate of intraperitoneal drain placement. Secondary outcomes included: rate and time to diagnosis of postoperative intraperitoneal collections; rate of surgical site infections (SSIs); time to discharge; and 30-day major postoperative complications (Clavien-Dindo grade at least III). After propensity score matching, multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards regression were used to estimate the independent association of the secondary outcomes with drain placement. Results Overall, 1805 patients from 22 countries were included (798 women, 44.2 per cent; median age 67.0 years). The drain insertion rate was 51.9 per cent (937 patients). After matching, drains were not associated with reduced rates (odds ratio (OR) 1.33, 95 per cent c.i. 0.79 to 2.23; P = 0.287) or earlier detection (hazard ratio (HR) 0.87, 0.33 to 2.31; P = 0.780) of collections. Although not associated with worse major postoperative complications (OR 1.09, 0.68 to 1.75; P = 0.709), drains were associated with delayed hospital discharge (HR 0.58, 0.52 to 0.66; P < 0.001) and an increased risk of SSIs (OR 2.47, 1.50 to 4.05; P < 0.001). Conclusion Intraperitoneal drain placement after elective colorectal surgery is not associated with earlier detection of postoperative collections, but prolongs hospital stay and increases SSI risk

Energy Correlation of Prompt Fission Neutrons

In all cases where neutron fluctuations in a branching process (such as in multiplicity measurements) are treated in an energy dependent description, the energy correlations of the branching itself (energy correlations of the fission neutrons) need to be known. To date, these are not known from experiments. Such correlations can be theoretically and numerically derived by modelling the details of the fission process. It was suggested earlier that the fact that the prompt neutrons are emitted from the moving fission targets, will influence their energy and angular distributions in the lab system, which possibly induces correlations. In this paper the influence of the neutron emission process from the moving targets on the energy correlations is investigated analytically and via numerical simulations. It is shown that the correlations are generated by the random energy and direction distributions of the fission fragments. Analytical formulas are derived for the two-point energy distributions, and quantitative results are obtained by Monte-Carlo simulations. The results lend insight into the character of the two-point distributions, and give quantitative estimates of the energy correlations, which are generally small

Design of a high order Campbelling mode measurement system using open source hardware

International audienc

Performance of Higher Order Campbell methods, Part I: review and numerical convergence study

International audienceThis paper investigates, through numerical simulations, the performance of a signal analysis method by which a high temperature fission chamber can be used over a wide range of count rates. Results reported in a previous paper (Elter et al., 2015 [I]) indicated that the traditional Campbell method and the pulse mode cannot provide a sufficient overlap at medium count rates. Hence the use of the so-called Higher Order Campbell (HOC) methods is proposed and their performance is investigated. It is shown that the HOC methods can guarantee the linearity (i.e. correctness) of the neutron flux estimation over a wide count rate, even during transient conditions. The capabilities of these methods for suppressing parasitic noise (originating from various sources) are verified

DEVELOPMENT OF A MODELING APPROACH TO ESTIMATE RADIATION FROM A SPENT FUEL ROD QUIVER

Before encapsulation of spent nuclear fuel in a geological repository, the fuels need to be verified for safeguards purposes. This requirement applies to all spent fuel assemblies, including those with properties or designs that are especially challenging to verify. One such example are quivers, a new type of containers used to hold damaged spent fuel rods. After placing damaged rods inside the quivers, they are sealed with a thick lid and the water is removed. The lid is thick enough to significantly reduce the amount of the gamma radiation penetrating through it, which can make safeguards verification from the top using gamma techniques difficult. Considering that the number of quivers at storage facilities is foreseen to increase in near future, studying the feasibility of verification is timely. In this paper we make a feasibility study related to safeguards verification of quivers, aimed at investigating the gamma and neutron radiation field around a quiver designed by Westinghouse AB and filled with PWR fuel rods irradiated at the Swedish Ringhals site. A simplified geometry of the quiver and the detailed operational history of each rod are provided by Westinghouse and the reactor operator, respectively. The nuclide inventory of the rods placed in the quiver and the emission source terms are calculated with ORIGEN-ARP. The radiation transport is modeled with the Serpent2 Monte Carlo code. The first objective is to assess the capability of the spent fuel attribute tester (SFAT) to verify the content for nuclear safeguards purposes. The results show that the thick quiver lid attenuates the gamma radiation, thereby making gamma radiation based verification from above the quiver difficult

DEVELOPMENT OF A MODELING APPROACH TO ESTIMATE RADIATION FROM A SPENT FUEL ROD QUIVER

Before encapsulation of spent nuclear fuel in a geological repository, the fuels need to be verified for safeguards purposes. This requirement applies to all spent fuel assemblies, including those with properties or designs that are especially challenging to verify. One such example are quivers, a new type of containers used to hold damaged spent fuel rods. After placing damaged rods inside the quivers, they are sealed with a thick lid and the water is removed. The lid is thick enough to significantly reduce the amount of the gamma radiation penetrating through it, which can make safeguards verification from the top using gamma techniques difficult. Considering that the number of quivers at storage facilities is foreseen to increase in near future, studying the feasibility of verification is timely. In this paper we make a feasibility study related to safeguards verification of quivers, aimed at investigating the gamma and neutron radiation field around a quiver designed by Westinghouse AB and filled with PWR fuel rods irradiated at the Swedish Ringhals site. A simplified geometry of the quiver and the detailed operational history of each rod are provided by Westinghouse and the reactor operator, respectively. The nuclide inventory of the rods placed in the quiver and the emission source terms are calculated with ORIGEN-ARP. The radiation transport is modeled with the Serpent2 Monte Carlo code. The first objective is to assess the capability of the spent fuel attribute tester (SFAT) to verify the content for nuclear safeguards purposes. The results show that the thick quiver lid attenuates the gamma radiation, thereby making gamma radiation based verification from above the quiver difficult