Verification of Source Term Analysis System for Decommissioning Wastes From a CANDU Reactor

Abstract

There are now twenty commercial nuclear power reactors operating as of May 2010 in South Korea. As nuclear capacity becomes higher and installations age, the Korean government and industry have launched R&D to estimate appropriate decommissioning costs of power reactors. In this paper, MCNP/ORIGEN2 code system which is being developed as a source term evaluation tool was verified by comparing the estimated nuclide inventory from MCNP/ORIGEN2 simulation with the measured nuclide inventory from chemical assay in an irradiated pressure tube discharged from Wolsong Unit 1 in 1994. Equilibrium core model of Wolsoung unit 1 was used as a neutron source to activate in-core and ex-core structural components. As a result, the estimated values from the analysis system agreed with measured data within 20% difference. Therefore, it can be concluded that MCNP/ORIGEN system could be a reliable tool to estimate source terms of decommissioning wastes from CANDU reactor, although this system assumes constant flux irradiation and snapshot equilibrium core model as a reference core.