News from ETSON and its members*
News from ETSON and its members*
Around 60 ETSON members met in Munich from 11 to 13 October 2022 for the first ETSON Conference. Representatives of the 14 European Technical Safety Organisations (TSOs) and Japan were present. Despite the current war, Ukraine was able to show its presence online and was represented with a virtual keynote speech to kick off the event. In addition to the member organisations of the ETSON network, experts from the European Commission (EC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also attended the conference. The event replaced the IAEA TSO Conference that was originally scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg.
To ensure the structural integrity of components which are on use in nuclear installations, it is necessary to know their resistance to the initiation and propagation of cracks. Because of their dimensions it is a quite demanding task to prepare the standard fracture mechanics specimens for a classical ASTM test. All the above-mentioned led to the need of introducing a new method for assessing the fracture material properties of tubes with thin walls, called Pin-Loading Test (PLT).
In the framework of the Euratom Research and Training Programme, HARMONISE (a project expected to start in mid-2022) will study relevant research and cooperation activities in standardization and nuclear safety considering also the lessons learnt from the stress tests performed in the EU. The project is coordinated by LEI and involves nine ETSON members along with partners representing research organisations, regulators and industry.
Graphite used in nuclear plants must be disposed of properly. Prolonged aging, even at room temperature, can lead to the formation of different species, such as graphite oxide, which has the possibility of being dispersed into the environment much more easily and this entails a risk that must be taken into consideration
Clearance measurement should be performed as a conformity assessment of the evaluated contamination values to the regulatory limit, considering the measurement’s uncertainty, including the uncertainty of the ratio of the activity concentration of the difficult to measure nuclide to that of the key nuclide. The key issues for the treatment of these uncertainty were summarized.
Advanced concepts of CANDU fuel bundles with more than 37 elements are analyzed comparatively to the 37-rods standard fuel bundle design from the safety performance point of view.
Scientists of Lithuanian Energy Institute have been developing an open-source turbulent combustion solver flameFoam, based on OpenFOAM toolkit. Code to code analysis and comparisons with experiments showed that flameFoam mostly corresponds to the state-of-the-art currently achieved in the field.
Application of statistical non-parametric methods to radioxenon distributions in atmosphere in order to study the atmospheric background fluctuations and the influence of anthropogenic activities.
NRA Secretariat experts developed an empirical method for estimating source vicinity ground-motion levels on hard bedrock and annual exceedance probabilities for inland crustal earthquakes with sources difficult to identify in advance.
For the examination of plasma and impurity transport in the DT experimental campaign, energy balance, dependency on discharge, and the time evolution of radiation loss profiles are provided by LEI scientists. Indeed, the record braking pulse is also being analyzed here at LEI.
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