American Nuclear Society
Home

Home / Publications / Journals / Nuclear Science and Engineering / Volume 196 / Number 5

A Study of Gamma Heating, Neutron Flux, and Gamma Flux Under Several Reactor Core Conditions in the McMaster Nuclear Reactor

Mohammed Alqahtani, Adriaan Buijs, Meshari ALQahtani

Nuclear Science and Engineering / Volume 196 / Number 5 / May 2022 / Pages 614-622

Technical Paper / dx.doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.2003651

Received:June 12, 2021
Accepted:October 28, 2021
Published:March 28, 2022

Changes in the thermal power of a nuclear research reactor will lead to changes in experimental, irradiation, and testing conditions. Consequently, reactor core parameters are inevitably susceptible to changes. One such parameter is gamma heating (GH), which results from gamma interaction with materials. In this work, a gamma thermometer was used to measure GH over the course of 7 operational days and nights. In addition, the Monte Carlo reactor physics code Serpent-2 was used to evaluate the sensitivity of common detection methods for monitoring reactor core parameters such as neutron fluxes, GH, and gamma flux under the following conditions: reactor core power variation, reactor core fuel shuffling, and detector vicinity fuel assembly shuffling. The GH values obtained through measurements and calculations were linearly proportional to the reactor power. In addition, the Serpent-2 code for the McMaster nuclear reactor showed that despite maintaining the reactor power core at the same level, the fuel burnup distribution could alter the studied parameters.