Fuel Burn-Up Measurement System

The Thermo Scientific™ Fuel Burn-Up Measurement System is designed to measure the burn-up of PBMR fuel spheres by means of spectroscopic evaluation. Optimized design maximizes system performance in order to measure burn-up of fuel elements having lifetime heavy metal utilization.

System is designed specifically to measure the burn-up of fuel spheres in a “pebble bed” high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. An integral part of fuel-handling and storage system operations, it uses a germanium detector along with proven proprietary spectral analysis signal processing to determine the Cesium-137 gamma peak.

• Classifies spheres as graphite, used fuel or spent fuel
• Comprised of three major components: High-purity germanium (HPGe) detector assembly with positioning table and cryogenic refrigeration system; digital signal processor(DSP)-based burn-up analysis system; photon collimator
• Analyses performed: Graphite/fuel discrimination, discrimination between low burn-up and high burn-up fuel, categorization of higher burn-up fuels as either used fuel or spent fuel