ESTIMATION OF ROUTINE DISCHARGE OF RADIONUCLIDES ON POWER REACTOR EXPERIMENTAL RDE

Abstract

Experimental power reactor (RDE) which is planned to be constructed by BATAN is a kind of High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGR) with 10 MWth power. HTGR is a helium gas-cooled reactor with TRISO-coated fuel that is able to confine fission products remained in the core. Although the fission products released into the environment are very small, in order to comply the regulations the study about environmental radiation on normal or routine operation condition need to be performed. Estimation of radiology in the environment involves the source term released into the environment under routine operation condition. The purpose of this study is to estimate the source term released into the environment based on postulation of normal or routine operations of RDE. The research approach starts with an assumption that there are defects and impurities in the TRISO fuel because of limitation during the fabrication. Mechanism of fission products release from the fuel to the environment was created based on the safety features design of RDE. Radionuclides inventories in the reactor were calculated using ORIGEN-2 whose library has been modified for HTGR type, and the assumptions of defects of the TRISO fuel and release fraction for each compartment of RDE safety system used a reference parameter. The results showed that the important source terms of RDE are group of noble gases (Kr and Xe), halogen (I), Sr, Cs, H-3, and Ag. Activities of RDE source terms for routine operations have no significant difference with the HTGR source terms with the same power.Keywords: routine discharge, radionuclide, source term, RDE, HTGR