Fuel Motion Monitoring During Transient Testing at TREAT
Abstract: In 2018 Idaho National Laboratory restarted the Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) after 23 years of inactivity. This marked a significant milestone in restoring the U.S. nuclear energy transient testing infrastructure and our ability to test nuclear fuels and materials under extreme nuclear conditions. The reactor is capable of producing transient bursts of up to 19 GW and can be used to simulate nuclear environments of different accident scenarios in light water reactors, liquid-metal cooled reactors, and molten salt reactors. An important diagnostic instrument associated with TREAT is the fast-neutron hodoscope, a system of collimators and detectors that generates real-time images of the location and movement of experimental nuclear fuels during tests. This presentation will review recent work associated with the TREAT program and testing that is now underway with fuel at TREAT.
Bio: David Chichester is a directorate fellow at Idaho National Laboratory, where he works to develop nondestructive radiation measurement systems and methods for advanced nuclear energy technology projects and nuclear nonproliferation and security programs. His research broadly covers many aspects of radiation instrumentation including system design, deployment and simulation and modeling of radiation measurement systems. He currently oversees research projects dealing with: high-rate, fast-neutron detection and imaging for transient nuclear fuel research; fast-neutron spectrometry; active neutron interrogation for special nuclear material detection and characterization; high-activity actinide characterization via alpha spectrometry; and the use of infrasound for monitoring nuclear facilities.
