Assessment of Irradiation Performance in the Jules Horowitz Reactor (JHR) using the CARMEN Measuring Device

Abstract

The development of the JHR experimental devices rely on the operational feedback from previous French material testing reactors (i.e. SILOE and OSIRIS). The experimental devices used for the irradiation of structural material were already facing technological limitations, in particular regarding the control of irradiation temperature and of the thermal gradients in the experimental samples, which is essential to ensure the quality of the experiments. Obtaining satisfactory thermal fields (in compliance with the setpoint and the homogeneity) is all the more difficult as the level of nuclear heating is higher in the JHR. This paper attempts to characterize the irradiation conditions in different experimental positions of the JHR and to compare them with the conditions and the empirical criteria of maximum acceptable temperature measured in OSIRIS. The study shows that the irradiation conditions obtained inside the experimental devices can sometimes be significantly different from the measured conditions using instrumentation devices. The interpretation of the experimental results and their transposition to other situations will always require a calculation versus measurement adjustment and the intensive use of computer simulation. However, despite all simulation and transposition efforts, the control of temperature conditions is not yet fully demonstrated and nothing will ultimately replace experimental validation.

Keywords

• material test reactor (mtr)
• differential calorimeter
• experimental devices
• reactor pressure vessel (rpv)