NUMERICAL EVALUATION OF THE PRODUCTION OF RADIONUCLIDES IN A NUCLEAR-REACTOR (PART-II)

A computer program called LAURA has been developed to predict the prod uction rates of any member of a nuclei network undergoing spontaneous decay and/or induced neutron transformation in a nuclear reactor. The theoretical bases for the development of LAURA were discussed in Part I. In particular, in Part I, we described how an expression based on t he Rubinson (1949) approach is used to evaluate the depletion function . In this paper (Part II), we describe the full simulation of radionuc lide production including the decomposition of a reaction network into independent linear chains, provisions for periodic reactor shutdown a nd restart, and implementation of an approximate solution given by Ray kin and Shlyakhter (1989) to account for the effect of feedback due to alpha decay. Also included are some examples which demonstrate possib le uses for LAURA. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.