A Proposal on Evaluation Method of Neutron Absorption Performance to Substitute Conventional Neutron Attenuation Test

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Background: For a verification of newly-developed neutron absorbers, one of guidelines on the qualification and acceptance of neutron absorbers is the neutron attenuation test. However, this approach can cause a problem for the qualifications that it cannot distinguish how the neutron attenuates from materials.


Materials and Methods: In this study, an estimation method of neutron absorption performances for materials is proposed to detect both direct penetration and back-scattering neutrons. For the verification of the proposed method, MCNP simulations with the experimental system designed in this study were pursued using the polyethylene, iron, normal glass and the vitrified form.


Results and Discussion: The results show that it can easily test neutron absorption ability using single absorber model. Also, from simulation results of single absorber and double absorbers model, it is verified that the proposed method can evaluate not only the direct thermal neutrons passing through materials, but also the scattered neutrons reflected to the materials. Therefore, the neutron absorption performances can be accurately estimated using the proposed method comparing with the conventional neutron attenuation test.


Conclusion: It is expected that the proposed method can contribute to increase the reliability of the performance of neutron absorbers.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 American Society Testing and Material, "Standard practice for qualification and acceptance of boron based metallic neutron absorbers for nuclear criticality control for dry cask storage systems and transportation packaging"

2 Kim JH, "A study on applicability of a new neutron absorber based on radioactive vitrified forms for PLUS7 and WH17x17 spent fuel storages" 27-29, 2015

3 Kim SH, "A feasibility study on the criticality control method using radioactive vitrified forms for spent fuel storage" 280 : 644-650, 2014