Investigation of Temperature Effects for Modelization and Simulation of the Treat Facility

From the initiation of operations in 1959, the Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility at Idaho National Laboratories possessed the potential to serve as the foremost transient testing site in the world. From 1959 to 1994, thousands of tests were conducted to investigate fission heating of test fuel, non-destructive test data through fuel radiography, and test fuels under severe criticality conditions. However, experiments have not been conducted since 1994. A resurging interest in fuel-motion testing has ignited new interest in the facility. Even after nearly 20 years, the return to operable conditions and resumption of testing at TREAT is believed to be feasible by the Department of Energy (DOE). As the facility prepares to resume testing, systematic and safety checks ensure the optimization of the facility. In preparation of testing resumption, models have been constructed to investigate the effects of temperature change in the experimental fuels on neutron flux observed in the hodoscope fuel-mass surveillance. Because of a wide range of expected fuel samples, it was necessary to determine the effects of temperature changes in the experimental test vehicle, if any, on neutron behavior at the center of the reactor system. Using Monte Carlo simulations, this study demonstrates that the temperature changes in the experimental test vehicle have no effect neutron flux response from the fuel samples tested within TREAT