Gamma-ray spectroscopy on irradiated MTR fuel elements

The availability of burnup data is an important requirement in any systematic approach to the enhancement of safety, economics and performance of a nuclear research reactor. This work presents the theory and experimental techniques applied to determine, by means of nondestructive gamma-ray spectroscopy, the burnup of Material Testing Reactor (MTR) fuel elements irradiated in the IEA-R1 research reactor. Burnup measurements, based on analysis of spectra that result from collimation and detection of gamma-rays emitted in the decay of radioactive fission products, were performed at the reactor pool area. The measuring system consists of a high-purity germanium (HPGe) detector together with suitable fast electronics and an on-line microcomputer data acquisition module. In order to achieve absolute burnup values, the detection set (collimator tube+HPGe detector) was previously calibrated in efficiency. The obtained burnup values are compared with ones provided by reactor physics calculations, for three kinds of MTR fuel elements with different cooling times, initial enrichment grades and total number of fuel plates. Both values show good agreement within the experimental error limits.