Education

A special course on the management of irradiated-graphite has been organized on 11 - 13 March 2009 at the Conference Centre, Fallowfield, Manchester, UK. Due to the large interest, an additional EUROCOURSE took place at St Jacut de la mer, FR, on 25-28 October 2010.

Contents:

The courses aimed to give a global overview of the subject drawing on historical aspects of nuclear graphite technology as well as more recent experience gained over the last 25 years. In addition to European graphite moderated reactor systems international experience will be covered including Russian RBMK and high temperature gas cooled reactors HTRs.

Over the last 25 years the HSE(ND) and more recently the Euratom-supported CARBOWASTE Consortium has recognised the need to ensure continued expertise and education in the area of nuclear graphite technology including the treatment and disposal of irradiated graphite. In addition to the UK and European needs there has been growing interest in nuclear graphite technology driven by developments in High Temperature Reactor Technology, such as PBMR, HTTR and HTR-10/ HTR-PM, as well as Generation IV VHTR systems such as NGNP (USA) for process heat applications.

This new interest along with the need to maintain the AGRs and Magnox reactors has led to new developments in nuclear graphite technology aimed at understanding the relationship of property change to microstructural changes brought about by irradiation. This has led to the application of new techniques to graphite technology such as x-ray tomography, SEM, HRTEM, RAMAN, Digital Image Correlation (DIC) etc. as well as the development of new assessment codes used to predict the life time of graphite components in reactor and the origin of contaminants relevant for the disposal of irradiated graphite.

There is also the requirement to deal with the graphite waste legacy related to reactor decommissioning. After reactor operation these graphite components (which amount to some 250,000 tonnes world-wide) will also need to be safely disposed, which could involve treatment, incineration or recycling.

last change: 06.12.2012 | | Print