Recent content by curie

For completeness, add reflectors to the list of composition criteria. It could be possible for increased neutron leakage - due to increased surface area - to be compensated by (or over-compensated by) the presence of a reflector.

A combination of biological monitoring (which is monitoring of the body's output: faeces, urine, saliva, nasal secretions, etc) and direct external monitoring will be able to detect pretty much any isotopes if they have been taken into the body and not already passed through or decayed. There...

Faecal monitoring is one of the best methods, if not the most pleasant. Also urine monitoring & nasal swabs.

Has anyone heard officially that there has been an upgrade to INES level 6? I've seen it around the web but it doesn't seem like a formal announcement.

The fuel in OPAL is shuffled monthly (for optimum burn up profile/powershaping) so presumably this defect was not seen in previous fuel movements. The pool is monitored by camera but from directly overhead so apparently the vertical translation was not noticed. I still would have expected the...

There is an INES report I believe but I couldn't find it online. They vary in detail anyway. In this case the operator & regulator disagreed on the INES rating. It has been given a provisional rating of 2. I was surprised the plate elevation was not spotted earlier, only during the...

Any ideas about the causes of the incident at the new Australian research reactor (OPAL) where some fuel plates in some of the assemblies were found to be elevated? I.e., translated vertically upwards. This has been reported as the plates being "partially" dislodged, but the actual degree of...

What keeps coming up is that Morbius is calling the operators stupid etc but they clearly were not stupid enough to fail the operator training that was in place so is the underlying reason of the accidents not the single fact that the oeprators were incompetent but rather that the system which...

Yes, in my opinion too. However I've seen in many facilities that operators progress to the senior role and that to do this, they just have to tick more boxes, not necessarily have the increased intellectual capacity and understanding that such a role should merit. Indeed, if they had that in...

I don't know exactly what training etc airline pilots need to have but in my country in both the power & research reactors, the actual operators, ie the people who drive the desk, are effectively little more than specialised techs. They do not have to be of the intellectual equivalent to have a...

Thanks. The Imperial College group are definitely using external neutrons, derived from a D-T generator somewhat ironically! I'll do some digging to see what the basis of their research is. Hopefully they are not flogging the proverbial dead horse.

A further technical paper by the UK Health Protection Agency has just been published in the Journal of Radiological Protection, with lots of gruesome details about the effect of alpha poisoning. http://ej.iop.org/links/rMi7FeUVd/2i8gh2LN2xGVnqiAav5vpA/jrp7_1_001.pdf

There is currently cold fusion research being undertaken in the UK at one of its well renowned technical & engineering universities, based on Taleyarkhan's work (sonofusion). One of the problems they are anticipating is distinction between the possible fusion-generated neutrons and the incident...

Just adding an operational-based aside here, that will be obvious to most, but may not be for readers that are novices to reactors. Another important reason for having a source is to help determine the neutron detectors are functioning correctly. If they are reading reading zero all the...