Nuclear Energy Agency Online Bulletin

April 2000

Covers new material for March 2000

The April bulletin covers the following items:

New publications

Business as Usual and Nuclear Power
ISBN 92-64-17175-4, 162 pages.

Reform of Civil Nuclear Liability: Budapest Symposium 1999
Réforme de la responsabilité civile nucléaire : Symposium de Budapest 1999
ISBN 92-64-05885-0, 675 pages.

The press communiqué for the Budapest Symposium is available in English and French at www.oecd-nea.org/news/2000/2000-04.html.

Nuclear safety

The last meeting of the CSNI Principal Working Group on the Confinement of Accidental Radioactive Releases (PWG4) was held on 28- 29 February. It adopted the final draft of a "PWG4 Perspective Statement on Ex-Vessel Hydrogen Sources", discussed the conclusions of the October 1999 Workshop on Ex-Vessel Debris Coolability, and examined long-term plans for an International Standard Problem (ISP) Exercise in the area of containment thermal hydraulics. It discussed reports on the progress of follow-up parametric calculations to ISP-41 (based on an AECL/RTF experiment), on the progress of ISP-44 (based on a KAEVER experiment), and progress on the preparation of an ISP based on test PHEBUS FPT-1. The group also discussed the preparation of workshops on Operator Training and Instrumentation Capabilities for Severe Accident Management and on the Implementation of Severe Accident Management Measures for Containment. A new Working Group on the Analysis and Management of Accidents (replacing PWG4 and PWG2) will meet for the first time at the end of September 2000.

The CSNI Workshop on Instrumentation and Monitoring of Concrete Structures, hosted by Tractebel and AVN at the Tractebel offices in Brussels, was held on 22-23 March 2000. Topics covered were: Regulatory Considerations and State of the Art, Detecting Ageing and Trends for the Future. The meeting was followed by a panel discussion. Participation of the industry was important, along with the participation of regulators and researchers from western and eastern European countries, and from the United States and Canada. Among the conclusions of the workshop were:

• The use and acceptance of instrumentation techniques has increased with time and more reliance is being placed on such techniques. In the past, less work had been done on this topic than in others, like metal structures, for example.
• One of the purposes of instrumentation is to assess the global behaviour of structures over time. In order to obtain this information, one must first of all be sure of the reliability of the sensors, of the data processing techniques and then ascertain how accurate the relation is between local measurements and the global behaviour.
• Ageing concerns all structures and might become a very sensitive issue for concrete structures due to the role they play following reactor shutdown. Related to that issue was the replacement of in-place instrumentation and cables. Techniques are available to install retrofitting of instrumentations, although some improvements are needed, in particular in establishing a relation between old and new data.
  

The following CSNI reports have just been released and can be found at www.oecd-nea.org/nsd/docs/indexcsni.html.

• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)2]: ICDE Project Report on Collection and Analysis of Common-cause Failures of Centrifugal Pumps, September 1999
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)10]: Best-Estimate Methods in Thermal-Hydraulic Safety Analysis, Seminar Proceedings, Ankara, Turkey, 29 June-1 July 1998
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)14/REV1]: Computer-based Systems Important to Safety (COMPSIS), Reporting Guidelines, July 1999
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)17]: Report on the CSNI Workshop on Nuclear Power Plant Transition from Operation into Decommissioning: Human Factors and Organisation Considerations, May 17-18, 1999, Rome, Italy
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)19]: Recurring Events, September 1999
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)21/Vol.1]: Identification and Assessment of Organisational Factors Related to the Safety of NPPs, State-of-the-art Report, September 1999, Volume 1
• [NEA/CSNI/R(1999)21/Vol.2] Identification and Assessment of Organisational Factors Related to the Safety of NPPs: Contributions from Participants and Member Countries, September 1999, Volume 2
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)22]: Best-Estimate Methods in Thermal-Hydraulic Safety Analysis, Summary and Conclusions of an OECD/CSNI Seminar, Ankara, Turkey, 29 June-1 July 1998
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)23]: Degraded Core Quench: Summary of Progress, 1996-1999, Executive Summary
• [NEA/CSNI/R(99)24]: Technical Opinion Paper on Fuel-Coolant Interaction, November 1999
• [NEA/CSNI/R(2000)5]: CSNI International Standard Problems: Brief Descriptions (1975-1999)
• [NEA/CSNI/R(2000)6/Vol.1]: International Standard Problem (ISP) No. 41, Containment Iodine Computer Code Exercise Based on a Radioiodine Test Facility (RTF) Experiment
• [NEA/CSNI/R(2000)8]: Impact of Short-term Severe Accident Management Actions in a Long-term Perspective, Final Report
• [NEA/CSNI/R(2000)9]: Insights into the Control of the Release of Iodine, Cesium, Strontium and Other Fission Products in the Containment by Severe Accident Management
• [NEA/CSNI/R(2000)10]: Carbon Monoxide - Hydrogen Combustion Characteristics in Severe Accident Containment Conditions, Final Report
• [NEA/CSNI/R(2000)12]: Workshop on Iodine Aspects of Severe Accident Management, Summary and Conclusions

Radioactive waste management

The 33rd plenary session of the Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC) was held in Paris on 9-10 March 2000. In addition to providing several status reports and discussing such activities as the planned launch of the Integration Group for the Safety Case in June 2000; the Forum on Stakeholder Confidence in August 2000; and the creation of a group on management of materials from decommissioning and dismantling; a special topical session was held on the theme of retrievability and reversibility. "Retrievability" refers to the ability to recuperate the disposed radioactive waste from the repository, whereas "reversibility" is the policy function that allows for a waste management project to change direction during its development. These concepts are being defined and explored in waste management programmes worldwide.

A meeting of regulators in the field of radioactive waste management was held on the day before the RWMC plenary session. A document on the regulatory control of radioactive waste in NEA Member countries is in preparation.

Nuclear science

The NEA Nuclear Science Committee (NSC) organised a workshop on Pyrochemical Separations in Avignon, France on 14-15 March 2000. One outcome of the meeting was a proposal to prepare a state-of-the-art report on this subject. The proposal will be presented for approval at the next meeting of the NSC in the beginning of June 2000.

First Announcement of the International Conference on Nuclear Data for Science and Technology. This conference will be held on 7-12 October 2001 in Tsukuba, Japan. This is an OECD Nuclear Energy Agency conference organised approximately every three years. These conferences are dedicated to communication among evaluators, experimentalists, and users in the nuclear data field. The 2001 Conference will provide a forum for exchanging information on new technologies, databases, and developments for nuclear and non-energy applications. For more information, visit the conference's web site at http://wwwndc.tokai.jaeri.go.jp/nd2001/.

Data Bank

The Data Bank would like to thank all those who took part in the survey carried out by Taylor Nelson Sofres in February. The feedback was most useful and will be used to improve the services in the following months. Congratulations to the three winners of the Palm Pilots who were from Austria, Italy and the Republic of Korea.

The next meeting of the JEFF working party on nuclear data evaluation, processing and benchmarking will take place at NEA headquarters on 22-24 May. Please watch our web site (www.oecd-nea.org/dbdata) for the final agenda.

The NEA has received a number of CD-ROMs containing plots and data of the new JENDL Dosimetry File 99 (JENDL/D-99) from JAERI, which are available free of charge upon request. The CD contains information for 47 nuclides and 67 reactions in both the SAND-II group structure and as 0K processed pointwise files. The pointwise files also include unresolved resonance parameters for self-shielding calculations, but cross sections are given explicitly in the pointwise format (MF=3).

Dates and topics of forthcoming training courses can be found at www.oecd-nea.org/dbcps/training-courses/.

Computer Program Services

A page giving the list of all new programs in the last 12 months can be found at www.oecd-nea.org/tools/abstract/new.

New software packages available from the Data Bank:

05-APR-2000 NEA-1327 CAPCAL,3-D Capacitance Calculator for VLSI Purposes (Arrived)
04-APR-2000 USCD1205 PCNUDAT,NUCL PROPERTIES DATA BASE & RETRIEVAL SYS  (Tested)
27-MAR-2000 NEA-0829 SCAT-2,X-SEC & ANGL_DISTR CALC FOR SPH NUCLEI BY OPTICAL_MODEL  (Tested)
22-MAR-2000 PSR-0455 MONTEBURNS,AN AUTOMATED, MULTI-STEP MONTE CARLO BURNUP CODE SYSTEM (Arrived)
21-MAR-2000 NEA-1623 IFPE/SPC-RE-GINNA,Full Length & Segmented Fuel Rodlet Irradiation in PWR (Arrived)
21-MAR-2000 NEA-0461 STAPREF, Nuclear Reactions X-Sections by Evaporation Model, Gamma-Cascades  (Tested)
20-MAR-2000 NEA-1612 PIN99W,MODELLING OF VVER AND PWR FUEL ROD THERMOMECHANICAL BEHAVIOUR  (Tested)
16-MAR-2000 CCC-0654 VENTURE-PC,REACTOR_ANAL_SYS WITH SENSITIVITY & BURNUP  (Tested)

Instructions on retrieving material from the NEA may be found at: www.oecd-nea.org/. Please note that scientific database access is only available to residents of OECD/NEA Data Bank member countries.

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