Utilization of gamma ray irradiation at the WASTEF Facility

Sano, Naruto; Yamashita, Naoki; Watanabe, Masaya; Tsukada, Manabu*; Hoshino, Kazutoyo*; Hirai, Koki; Ikegami, Yuta*; Tashiro, Shinsuke; Yoshida, Ryoichiro; Hatakeyama, Yuichi; et al.

JAEA-Technology 2023-029, 36 Pages, 2024/03

JAEA-Technology-2023-029.pdf:2.47MB

At the Waste Safety Testing Facility (WASTEF), the gamma ray irradiation device "Gamma Cell 220" was relocated from the 4th research building of the Nuclear Science Research Institute in FY2019, and the use of gamma ray irradiation has begun. Initially, Fuel Cycle Safety Research Group, Fuel Cycle Safety Research Division, Nuclear Safety Research Center, Sector of Nuclear Safety Research and Emergency Preparedness, the owner of this device, conducted the tests as the main user, but since 2022, other users, including those outside the organization, have started using it. The gamma ray irradiation device "Gamma Cell 220" is manufactured by Nordion International Inc. in Canada. Since it was purchased in 1989, the built-in 60Co radiation source has been updated once, and safety research related to nuclear fuel cycles, etc. It is still used for this purpose to this day. This report summarizes the equipment overview of the gamma ray irradiation device "Gamma Cell 220", its permits and licenses at WASTEF, usage status, maintenance and inspection, and future prospects.

Japanese Evaluated Nuclear Data Library version 5; JENDL-5

Iwamoto, Osamu; Iwamoto, Nobuyuki; Kunieda, Satoshi; Minato, Futoshi; Nakayama, Shinsuke; Abe, Yutaka*; Tsubakihara, Kosuke*; Okumura, Shin*; Ishizuka, Chikako*; Yoshida, Tadashi*; et al.

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 60(1), p.1 - 60, 2023/01

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2022.2141903

Free-surface flow simulations with floating objects using lattice Boltzmann method

Watanabe, Seiya*; Kawahara, Jun*; Aoki, Takayuki*; Sugihara, Kenta; Takase, Shinsuke*; Moriguchi, Shuji*; Hashimoto, Hirotada*

Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Mechanics, 17(1), p.2211143_1 - 2211143_23, 2023/00

https://doi.org/10.1080/19942060.2023.2211143

In tsunami inundations or slope disasters of heavy rain, a lot of floating debris or driftwood logs are included in the flows. The damage to structures from solid body impacts is more severe than the damage from the water pressure. In order to study free-surface flows that include floating debris, developing a high-accurate simulation code of free-surface flows with high performance for large-scale computations is desired. We propose the single-phase free-surface flow model based on the cumulant lattice Boltzmann method coupled with a particle-based rigid body simulation. The discrete element method calculates the contact interaction between solids. An octree-based AMR (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) method is introduced to improve computational accuracy and time-to-solution. High-resolution grids are assigned near the free surfaces and solid boundaries. We conducted two kinds of tsunami flow experiments in the 15 and 70 m water tanks at Hachinohe Institute of Technology and Kobe University to validate the accuracy of the proposed model. The simulation results have shown good agreement with the experiments for the drifting speed, the number of trapped wood pieces, and the stacked angles.

Clogging properties of HEPA filter induced by loading of soot from burned glove-box panel materials

Tashiro, Shinsuke; Ono, Takuya; Amano, Yuki; Yoshida, Ryoichiro; Watanabe, Koji*; Abe, Hitoshi

Nuclear Technology, 208(10), p.1553 - 1561, 2022/10

https://doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2045179

To contribute to the confinement safety evaluation of the radioactive materials in the Glove box (GB) fire accident, combustion tests with the Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and the Polycarbonate (PC) as typical panel materials for the GB have been conducted with a relatively large scale apparatus. As the important data for evaluating confinement safety, the release ratio and the particle size distribution of the soot generated from the burned materials were obtained. Furthermore, the rise of the differential pressure (P) of the high efficiency particle air (HEPA) filter by the soot loading was also investigated. As results, the release ratio of the soot from the PC was about seven times as large as the PMMA. In addition, it was found that the behavior of the rise of the P with soot loading could be represented uniformly regardless of kinds of combustion materials by considering effect of the loading volume of the soot particle in the relatively low loading region.

Theoretical study of deuteron-induced reactions in the nuclear data field

Nakayama, Shinsuke; Iwamoto, Osamu; Watanabe, Yukinobu*; Ogata, Kazuyuki*

Few-Body Systems, 63(1), p.4_1 - 4_6, 2022/03

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00601-021-01712-2

Intensive neutron sources using deuteron accelerators have been proposed for not only science and engineering fields but also medical applications. For the engineering design of such facilities, accurate and comprehensive nuclear data of deuteron-induced reactions are indispensable. However, it is difficult to meet the requirement by employing experimental data alone. Thus, theoretical model calculations play a key role in completing the necessary nuclear data by interpolation and extrapolation of experimental data. Under the above situations, we have been developing a code system dedicated for deuteron-induced reactions, called DEURACS. In the present work, calculations using DEURACS are compared with available experimental data and validation of the present modelling in DEURACS is discussed. Moreover, the importance of consideration of the breakup processes for accurate prediction of deuteron-induced reactions is also presented.

JENDL/DEU-2020; Deuteron nuclear data library for design studies of accelerator-based neutron sources

Nakayama, Shinsuke; Iwamoto, Osamu; Watanabe, Yukinobu*; Ogata, Kazuyuki*

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 58(7), p.805 - 821, 2021/07

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2020.1870010

Intensive fast neutron sources using deuteron accelerators have been proposed for various applications. To contribute to the design study of such neutron sources, a deuteron nuclear data library for Li, Be, and C up to 200 MeV, JENDL/DEU-2020 is developed. The evaluation of JENDL/DEU-2020 are performed by employing the code system DEURACS with particular attention to neutron production data. Toward the evaluation of JENDL/DEU-2020, some modifications are made to DEURACS. The validation of the library is performed though simulation with the Monte Carlo transport calculation codes. From the simulation, it is shown that the calculation results based on JENDL/DEU-2020 reproduce the measured neutron production data well in the incident energies up to 200 MeV. The new library is expected to make a large contribution to diverse design studies of deuteron accelerator neutron sources.

Measurement of double-differential thick-target neutron yields of the C() reaction at 12, 20, and 30 MeV

Patwary, M. K. A*; Kin, Tadahiro*; Aoki, Katsumi*; Yoshinami, Kosuke*; Yamaguchi, Masaya*; Watanabe, Yukinobu*; Tsukada, Kazuaki; Sato, Nozomi*; Asai, Masato; Sato, Tetsuya; et al.

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 58(2), p.252 - 258, 2021/02

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2020.1819908

While designing deuteron accelerator neutron sources for radioisotopes production, nuclear data for light elements such as Li, Be, and C have been systematically measured in the deuteron energy range from a few MeV to around 50 MeV. Currently, the experimental data available on double-differential thick-target neutron yields (DDTTNYs) is insufficient, especially for deuteron energies between 18 and 33 MeV. In this study, we measured the DDTTNYs of () reactions on C target for incident deuteron energies of 12, 20, and 30 MeV using the multiple-foils activation method to improve nuclear data insufficiency. We applied the GRAVEL code for the unfolding process to derive the DDTTNYs. The results were compared with the calculation by DEURACS. The present data were also used to confirm the systematics of the differential neutron yields at 0 and total neutron yield per incident deuteron in the wide range of deuteron energy.

Consistent modelling of material weight loss and gas release due to pyrolysis and conducting benchmark tests of the model; A Case for glovebox panel materials such as polymethyl methacrylate

Ono, Takuya; Tashiro, Shinsuke; Amano, Yuki; Yoshida, Naoki; Yoshida, Ryoichiro; Abe, Hitoshi

PLOS ONE (Internet), 16(1), p.e0245303_1 - e0245303_16, 2021/01

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245303

It is necessary to consider how a glove box's confinement function will be lost when evaluating the amount of radioactive material leaking from a nuclear facility during a fire. In this study, we build a model that consistently explains the weight loss of glove box materials because of heat input from a flame and accompanying generation of the pyrolysis gas. The weight loss suggests thinning of the glove box housing, and the generation of pyrolysis gas suggests the possibility of fire spreading. The target was polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), used as the glove box panel. Thermal gravimetric tests on PMMA determined the parameters to be substituted in the Arrhenius equation for predicting the weight loss in pyrolysis. The pyrolysis process of PMMA was divided into 3 stages with activation energies of 62 kJ/mol, 250 kJ/mol, and 265 kJ/mol. Furthermore, quantifying the gas composition revealed that the composition of the pyrolysis gas released from PMMA can be approximated as 100 percent methyl methacrylate. This result suggests that the released amount of methyl methacrylate can be estimated by the Arrhenius equation. To investigate the validity of such estimation, a sealed vessel test was performed. In this test, we observed increase of the number of gas molecules during the pyrolysis as internal pressure change of the vessel. The number of gas molecules was similar to that estimated from the Arrhenius equation, and indicated the validity of our method. Moreover, we also performed the same tests on bisphenol-A-polycarbonate (PC) for comparison. In case of PC, the number of gas molecules obtained in the vessel test was higher than the estimated value.

Recent progress of a code system DEURACS toward deuteron nuclear data evaluation

Nakayama, Shinsuke; Iwamoto, Osamu; Watanabe, Yukinobu*

EPJ Web of Conferences, 239, p.03014_1 - 03014_4, 2020/09

https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202023903014

Intensive neutron sources using deuteron accelerators have been proposed for various applications such as irradiation test for fusion reactor materials and production of radioisotopes for medical use. In addition, transmutation system using deuteron-induced spallation reactions has been recently proposed for LLFPs. Accurate and comprehensive deuteron nuclear data are indispensable in the design study of such facilities. Under the above situations, we have been developing a code system dedicated for deuteron-induced reactions, which is called DEURACS. In the present work, calculations using DEURACS are compared with available experimental data up to 200 MeV such as DDXs for emission of neutron or light charged particles. We also analyze isotopic production cross sections of residual nuclei. Validation of the present modelling in DEURACS is discussed through comparison with the experimental data.

How different is the core of F from O ?

Tang, T. L.*; Uesaka, Tomohiro*; Kawase, Shoichiro; Beaumel, D.*; Dozono, Masanori*; Fujii, Toshihiko*; Fukuda, Naoki*; Fukunaga, Taku*; Galindo-Uribarri, A.*; Hwang, S. H.*; et al.

Physical Review Letters, 124(21), p.212502_1 - 212502_6, 2020/05

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.212502

The structure of a neutron-rich F nucleus is investigated by a quasifree () knockout reaction. The sum of spectroscopic factors of orbital is found to be 1.0 0.3. The result shows that the O core of F nucleus significantly differs from a free O nucleus, and the core consists of 35% O, and 65% excited O. The result shows that the O core of F nucleus significantly differs from a free O nucleus. The result may infer that the addition of the proton considerably changes the neutron structure in F from that in O, which could be a possible mechanism responsible for the oxygen dripline anomaly.