During the past few decades, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has made significant investments to improve nuclear data libraries, as the quality of this data impacts nearly all analyses of nuclear systems. Nuclear fission product yields are one component of these libraries, and are important for the analysis of...
The subject of this thesis is the development of a nodal discretization of the low-order quasi-diffusion (QDLO) equations for global reactor core calculations. The advantage of quasi-diffusion (QD) is that it is able to capture transport effects at the surface between unlike fuel assemblies better than the diffusion approximation. We...
Benchmark calculations are performed for neutron transport in a two material
(binary) stochastic multiplying medium. Spatial, angular, and energy dependence
are included. The problem considered is based on a fuel assembly of a common
pressurized water nuclear reactor. The mean chord length through the assembly is
determined and used as...
Real-time, high efficiency neutron spectroscopy has, historically, been a persistent challenge in the field of radiation detection and, for the most part, has gone unsolved. The most promising method to resolve this challenge, is the boron-capture technique using an organic scintillation system (BC-523a). Detectors that utilize this method possess an...
A lead slowing-down spectrometer (LSDS) was modeled in the hopes of beginning a nuclear data development campaign at Oregon State University. An LSDS can be used for neutron interrogation techniques, such as determining isotopic inventory of a sample of unknown components or determining the cross section of a sample of...
The Neutron radiography facility (NRF) at Oregon State University (OSU) has been modified to begin working on the non-destructive evaluation of concrete materials to study the early stages of shrinkage, cracking, and water transport of concrete during the curing process.
The objective of this work is to investigate the efficiency...
CR-39 foils were irradiated as part of nuclear accident dosimetry experiments using the Godiva reactor at the Nevada National Security Site and the Caliban and Prospero reactors at the Valduc Centre for Nuclear Studies in France. The irradiated foils were chemically etched using the standard Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory process...
An important improvement in the area of reactor core neutronic modeling is the development and use of the methods based on "quasi-diffusion" (QD) low-order equations. This family of methods takes into account the transport exactly using "functionals" computed by solving transport equations, and is amenable to solution with a variety...
Through a joint effort by the Swiss Federal
Institute for Reactor Research and Oregon State
University, the fuels modeling code SPECKLE is being
developed to model sphere-pac mixed carbide nuclear fuel.
Major parameters, such as fission gas release, fuel
restructuring phenomena, and the temperature and porosity
distributions in the fuel...
The cell survival curve is the only means by which to both qualitatively and
quantitatively assess morphologic alterations directly resulting from in vitro irradiation of
the cell. A ⁶⁰Co cell survival curve experiment has successfully demonstrated the
response of the AtT-20 clone mammalian cell line to the effects of gamma...