Radiation Protection Practices during the Helium Circulator Maintenance of the 10 MW High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor-Test Module (HTR-10)

Abstract

Current radiation protection methodology offers abundant experiences on light-water reactors, but very few studies on high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR). To fill this gap, a comprehensive investigation was performed to the radiation protection practices in the helium circulator maintenance of the Chinese 10 MW HTR test module (HTR-10) in this paper. The investigation reveals the unique behaviour of HTR-10’s radiation sources in the maintenance as well as its radionuclide species and presents the radiation protection methods that were tailored to these features. Owing to these practices, the radioactivity level was kept low throughout the maintenance and only low-level radioactive waste was generated. The quantitative analysis further demonstrates that the decontamination efficiency was over 89% for surface contamination and over 34% for γ dose rate and the occupational exposure was much lower than both the limits of regulatory and the exposure levels in comparable literature. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the reported radiation protection practices, which directly provides hands-on experience for the future HTR-PM reactor and adds to the completeness of the radiation protection methodology.