Load cell monitoring in Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plants: Potentialities for improved safeguard verifications (original) (raw)

Monitoring of Nuclear Material Movements at a Reprocessing Plant

A process monitoring software tool has been developed, which allows inspectors a remote verification of nuclear material movements based on the interpretation of neutron and gamma signals, which are measured during the trajectory and online analysed. Neither supervision nor control is intended with the software but a checking of the required coherency and conformity with safeguards purposes. The data analysis and interpretation kernel supports the inspector in the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle and allows in particular near real time accountancy in a reprocessing plant. To monitor the nuclear material flow for near real time accountancy purposes a diagnostic aid for the inspectorate was conceived, which interprets data from solution and powder measurements of different kind and at different steps in the process. In a first step tank transfers have been analysed by syntactic pattern recognition and introduction of functional blocks. A predefined sequence of functional blocks yiel...

The detection of undeclared LEU production at a GCEP by real time mass balancing

2007

Real-Time Mass Evaluation System (RTMES) performance during undeclared LEU production is examined through simulation. The RTMES is first outlined: the system would analyse load cell data collected continuously from the autoclaves and cooling chambers located in the feed, tails and product stations of a GCEP. These load cells are often installed for operational purposes. The term Real-Time is preferred to

Monitoring a gas-cooled nuclear reactor core integrity

2008

This work concerns with the problem of monitoring an Advanced Gas-cooled Nuclear Reactor (AGR) core. In the world wide context of energy production, the advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) nuclear power stations are approaching the end of their predicted operational live. Currently, it has been proposed to extend the operational lifetime of the nuclear plants if the distortions of the reactor cores are not as severe as initially predicted, and if it is possible to prove that the reactors are still safe to operate.