Tomographic measurements of thermal power in nuclear fuel rods : Stage 2 progress report December 1999

This report presents recent progress in a project on tomographic measurements of thermal power in nuclear fuel rods, carried out at Uppsala University and funded via the Swedish Centre for Nuclear Technology, KTC. The project is executed in three stages, of which this report describes a set of studies made during the second stage. Experimental studies have been performed using a laboratory mock-up, modelling a fuel assembly of the BWR8x8 type, in which tomographic data collection is made using BGO scintillator detectors and a data-acquisition system based on single-channel analysers. Gamma-ray scattering has been identified as a major contributor to systematic errors in the measurement of relative activity contents in the 63 rods of the mock-up assembly. Since scattering causes build-up of radiation at lower energies, it may be taken into account in the tomographic analyses by introducing a so-called effective attenuation coefficient in the reconstruction models, being slightly lower than the theoretical coefficient. Studies show that this approach may enhance the precision in the measurement of relative rod-activity contents from about 3‑4% down to about 1.2‑1.4%. Data collection has also been performed using a separate, spectroscopic data-acquisition system, in a set of measurements where inactive rods have been used to introduce scattering in order to analyse its effects on the collected data. The results indicate that most of the adverse effects of scattering may be eliminated by deploying a spectroscopic system with peak analysis including background subtraction. Consequently, such a system should be considered for Stage 3 of this project. Simulation studies have also been executed to analyse the measurement uncertainties introduced by geometric deviations from the nominal positions of the four sections of a SVEA‑64 fuel assembly. It was found that the standard deviation of relative rod activities caused by the largest displacements allowed by the nominal gaps enclosing each section was about 0.5%, which may be considered acceptable