[en] This paper reviews the work done by Murray in the areas of nuclear research and education. Topics considered in the paper include fuel management, historical aspects, educational facilities, and the fuel cycle

[en] Utilities are increasingly realizing the importance of having a full in-house capability in the field of in-core fuel management. This requires competent staff as well as accurate, reliable and easy-to-use computer codes. The development of advanced computer codes is thus an important task for the utilities and the supporting industry. (author)

[en] An outline of the fuel management calculations by COSMOS is stated. The COSMOS database, datablocks and nests, labels are exposed

[en] The transient behaviour for a refuelling system of any strategy is investigated for a normalized quadratic reactivity-burnup model. It is found that such a system converges successfully to steady-state operating conditions for any physically realistic representation. The stability of this equilibrium is examined for two conceivable fuel management errors. It is stable in the face of cycle length perturbations, but the reloading sequence of low order systems may break down if partially burnt fuel is inadvertently loaded. (author)

[en] The capability of biased multiobjective function optimization has been added to the Westinghouse Electric Company's (Westinghouse's) Advanced Loading Pattern Search code (ALPS). The search process, given a user-defined set of design constraints, proceeds to minimize a global parameter called the total value associated with constraints compliance (VACC), an importance-weighted measure of the deviation from limit and/or margin target. The search process takes into consideration two equally important user-defined factors while minimizing the VACC, namely, the relative importance of each constraint with respect to the others and the optimization of each constraint according to its own objective function. Hence, trading off margin-to-design limits from where it is abundantly available to where it is badly needed can now be accomplished. Two practical methods are provided to the user for input of constraints and associated objective functions. One consists of establishing design limits based on traditional core design parameters such as assembly/pin burnup, power, or reactivity. The second method allows the user to write a program, or script, to define a logic not possible through ordinary means. This method of script writing was made possible through the application resident compiler feature of the technical user language integration processor (tulip), developed at Westinghouse. For the optimization problems studied, ALPS not only produced candidate loading patterns (LPs) that met all of the conflicting design constraints, but in cases where the design appeared to be over constrained gave a wide range of LPs that came very close to meeting all the constraints based on the associated objective functions

No abstract available

[en] A perturbation method for fuel evaluation and shuffling analysis, making use of the heuristically-based GPT theory is discussed. The use of the inverse multiplication coefficient, λ, instead of ρ is considered. The discrepancies between the ρ-mode and λ-mode approaches are investigated. (U.K.)

[en] A perturbation methodology is described by which the reactor behaviour of a reactor system during burnup can be analysed making use of Generalized Perturbation Theory (GPT) codes already available in the linear domain. Typical quantities that can be studied with the proposed methodology are the amount of a specified material at the end of cycle, the fluence in a specified region, the reactor residual reactivity at end of reactor life cycle. The potentiality of the method for fuel shuffling studies is also described

[en] The asymptotic cycle behaviour for any order of M-batch refuelling and the transient behaviour for the 2-batch system are investigated for a normalized quadratic reactivity-burnup model for physically realistic representations, and found to give useful (and stable) results. In this regime, transients converge to the equilibrium solution. The 2-batch system characteristics are further explored for less physical quadratic reactivity curves, and several interesting features are revealed; in particular, a regime in which two possible steady-state cycle times exist is discovered. (author)

[en] Quality improvement as a management task. General industrial experience has shown that the operators in situ, that is at the machine or computer, are responsible at most for about 20% of quality defects. The overwhelming part of such defects is caused by the preceding chain links planning - development - design - construction - conception of production machinery or computers - and thus essentially by management decisions. The necessary change in the consciousness of managers and staff is not easy to achieve. The KWU-B-Q action aims at attaining that change of consciousness in the area of the nuclear fuel cycle. (orig./DG)