This page identifies a sequence of papers, reports, and student theses (several have full versions available) that document my involvement in the area of ex-core neutron activation analysis. A brief overview also identifies the general motivation and direction for this work. Hopefully some of the materials available here will be useful in your work/studies. Enjoy!!!

Overview
Way back in the early 1980s when I was a staff member at ORNL, I remember complaining about the lack of capability to perform space- and energy-dependent excore activation analyses. At the time I was working on a sensitivity study involving the excore detectors in the Clinch River Breeder Reactor (CRBR), and I wanted to include some aspect related to the exposure of the detectors to a neutron field over a long period of time -- I really don't remember the details. In any case, the ORIGEN code was the only tool available and it was, shall I say, less than optimum for the task. Well, the project was never completed because, as you know, the CRBR project was canceled.

Now fast forward to 1994. I had just completed a 3-year consulting project with Yankee Atomic Electric Company and I found myself with some spare time -- how unusual!!! Well, anyway, since I am not one to sit around with nothing to do, I decided to develop a code to perform space- and energy-dependent excore activation calculations -- since the situation from the early 1980s had not really changed. After about 3 months full time effort in the summer of 1994, I had generated the first version of the ACTIV code -- a modular system that uses multigroup pointwise fluxes from the DORT code to do detailed excore activation computations at any desired points in the DORT model. Shortly thereafter, I got formally involved with the IAEA in benchmarking current capability to perform these kinds of analyses, and also with Yankee Atomic, who was in the middle of some decommissioning studies. Thus, my involvement with activation analysis methods and applications was initiated and, as they say, the rest is history…

List of Papers, Reports, and Student Theses
J. R. White and A. P. Fyfe, "UMass-Lowell Results of the IAEA Benchmark Calculation of Radioactive Inventory for Fission Reactor Decommissioning," Report of IAEA Benchmark Exercise for the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, Austria (July 1995). (full version)

J. R. White and A. P. Fyfe, "UMass-Lowell Results for the JPDR Activation Analysis Benchmark," 1996 Radiation Protection & Shielding Topical Meeting, No. Falmouth, Massachusetts (April 1996). (full version)

J. R. White, "Final Deliverables for the ACTIV Code Project," Final Report for UMass-Lowell Research Foundation Project No. 05-07741 (Sept. 1997). (full versions of the Summary Report, Appendix I, Appendix II, Appendix III, and Appendix IV)

J. R. White, "Updated Results for the JPDR Activation Analysis Benchmark Using VITAMIN-B6 and BUGLE-96 Data," 1998 ANS Radiation Protection and Shielding Topical Conference, Nashville, TN (April 1998). (full version)

J. R. White, "On Computing the Thermal Flux in Ex-Core Neutron Activation Studies," Report for UMass-Lowell Research Foundation Project No. 05-08453 (Jan. 2000). (full version)

J. R. White, "SYN2D Summary Notes and Usage with 1-D Versus 2-D Comparisons for the JPDR," Report for UMass-Lowell Research Foundation Project No. 05-08453 (Jan. 2000). (full version)

J. R. White and A. Jirapongmed, "Activation Analysis for the Fermi 1 Reactor," Final Report for UMass-Lowell Research Foundation Project No. 05-08620 (Jan. 2001).

Areeya Jirapongmed, "Activation Analysis using the ACTIV Code System," MS Thesis, Energy Engineering (Nuclear Option), UMass-Lowell (Aug. 2002).

A. Jirapongmed and J. R. White, "Activation Analysis Using the ACTIV Code System," ANS 2002 Winter Meeting, Washington, D.C. (Nov. 2002).

Last updated by Prof. John R. White (January 2003)

Last | Top | Next