[en] The IAEA Conference on 'The Safety of Nuclear Power: Strategy for the Future' in 1991 was a milestone in nuclear safety. Two of the important items addressed by this conference were ensuring and enhancing safety of operating plants and treatment of nuclear power plants built to earlier safety standards. A number of publications related to these two items issued subsequent to this conference were: A Common Basis for Judging the Safety of Nuclear Power Plants Built to Earlier Standards, INSAG-9 (1995), the IAEA Safety Guide 50-SG-O12, periodic Safety Review of Operational Nuclear Power Plants (1994) and an IAEA publication on the Safety Evaluation of Operating Nuclear Power Plants Built to Earlier Standards - A Common Basis for Judgement (1997). Some of the findings of the 1991 Conference have not yet been fully addressed. An IAEA Symposium on reviewing the Safety of Existing Nuclear Power Plants in 1996 showed that there is an urgent need for operating organizations and national authorities to review operating nuclear power plants which do not meet the high safety levels of the vast majority of plants and to undertake improvements with assistance from the international community if required. Safety reviews of operating nuclear power plants take on added importance in the context of the Convention on Nuclear safety and its implementation. The purpose of this TECDOC compilation based on broad international experience, is to assist the Member States in the reassessment of operating plants by providing a list of generic safety issues identified in nuclear power plants together with measures taken to resolve these issues. These safety issues are generic in nature with regard to light water reactors and the measures for their resolution are for use as a reference for the safety reassessment of operating plants. The TECDOC covers issues thought to be significant to Member States based on consensus process. It provides an introduction to the use of generic safety issues for LWRs, presents generic observations on safety aspects identified from the issues grouped according to the source of the issues and contains about 140 generic safety issues related to design and operation grouped according to areas of design and operation

[en] The main activities concerning the state of art of WWER type pressure vessels included validation of empirical relationships between irradiation embrittlement and chemical composition as well as temperature, fluence and flux; validation of annealing regime; determination of initial mechanical properties and evaluation of actual material properties of the operating WWER-440/230 NPP pressure vessels. Concern tasks for life management of WWER-440 (models 230 and 231) and WWER 1000 were defined, based on the obtained results

[en] One of the options to mitigate the effects of irradiation on reactor pressure vessels (RPV) is to thermally anneal them to restore the toughness properties that have been degraded by neutron irradiation. This paper summarizes experimental results from work performed as part of the Heavy-Section Steel Irradiation (HSSI) Program managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The HSSI Program focuses on annealing and re-embrittlement response of materials which are representative of those in commercial RPVs and which are considered to be radiation-sensitive. Experimental studies include (1) the annealing of materials in the existing inventory of previously irradiated materials, (2) reirradiation of previously irradiated/annealed materials in a collaborative program with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), (3) irradiation/annealing/reirradiation of U.S. and Russian materials in a cooperative program with the Russian Research Center-Kurchatov Institute (RRC-KI), (4) the design and fabrication of an irradiation/anneal/reirradiation capsule and facility for operation at the University of Michigan Ford Reactor, (5) the investigation of potential for irradiation-and/or thermal-induced temper embrittlement in heat-affected zones (HAZs) of RPV steels due to phosphorous segregation at grain boundaries, and (6) investigation of the relationship between Charpy impact toughness and fracture toughness under all conditions of irradiation, annealing, and reirradiation

[en] The current methodology for determination of fracture toughness of irradiated reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels is based on the upward temperature shift of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) K_Ic curve from either measurement of Charpy impact surveillance specimens or predictive calculations based on a database of Charpy impact tests from RPV surveillance programs. Currently, the provisions for determination of the upward temperature shift of the curve due to irradiation are based on the Charpy V-notch (CVN) 41-J shift, and the shape of the fracture toughness curve is assumed to not change as a consequence or irradiation. The ASME curve is a function of test temperature (T) normalized to a reference nit-ductility temperature, RT_NDT, namely, T-RT_NDT. That curve was constructed as the lower boundary to the available K_Ic database and, therefore, does not consider probability matters. Moreover, to achieve valid fracture toughness data in the temperature range where the rate of fracture toughness increase with temperature is rapidly increasing, very large test specimens were needed to maintain plain-strain, linear-elastic conditions. Such large specimens are impractical for fracture toughness testing of each RPV steel, but the evolution of elastic-plastic fracture mechanics has led to the use of relatively small test specimens to achieve acceptable cleavage fracture toughness measurements, K_Jc, in the transition temperature range. Accompanying this evolution is the employment of the Weibull distribution function to model the scatter of fracture toughness values in the transition range. Thus, a probabilistic-based bound for a given data population can be made. Further, it has been demonstrated by Wallin that the probabilistic-based estimates of median fracture toughness of ferritic steels tend to form transition curves of the same shape, the so-called ''master curve'', normalized to one common specimen size, namely the 1T [i.e., 1.0-in-thick (25-mm)] specimen. Thus, fracture toughness of the material can be described by a fracture toughness-based reference temperature rather that by a temperature derived from a combination of drop-weight and Charpy impact tests. A statistical size correction based upon weakest-link theory is used to adjust the measured fracture toughness to that expected from a 1T specimen. Although the details of a consensus procedure is still under development, the basic procedure is widely used now to characterize elastic-plastic K_Jc values in the transition range. For application to commercial nuclear RPVs, however, various uncertainties are being investigated as part of the Heavy-Section Steel Irradiation (HSSI) Program managed by the Oak Ridge National laboratory (ORNL) for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. These include the use of relatively small specimens, e.g., precracked CVN (PCVN) and smaller size specimens, the applicability of the master curve to highly irradiated steels, and the effects of intergranular fracture. (author)

[en] Physics at DAΦNE, the new Frascati e⁺e^- machine, is reviewed, as well as the experiments: DEAR - search for K N exotic atoms, FINUDA - spectroscopy and decays of hypernuclei, and KLOE - a multipurpose detector designed for detecting direct CP violation

[en] For the study of different renal affections with repercussion in the parenchyma is widely used the plane gammagraphy wit ^99m Tc-Dmsa though not in the same way the SPECT technique. In general, the different inclination and orientation of the longitudinal axes of both kidneys in the patients entail aid to high variability in the detection of the different types of defects which leads to a possible mistaken diagnostic. With a view to this,it was developed in our centre a methodology for the automated reorientation of the different renal volumes obtained by SPECT and its posterior processing, obtaining as result a software with a high grade of independence from the operator. In this way, it is obtained a procedure standardization and so it let us with major rigor to realize evolutive studies of the patients. (Author)

[en] The present work shows the dose values to crystalline for the personnel which works in interventional radiology procedures. It was took data of 436 studies with a total of 2,133.4 minutes in fluoroscopy and 19,563 images. It was showed dose values to crystalline in three situations: without blinding, with blinding of 0.25 and 0.50 mm Pb and by type of study: fluoroscopy, graphie and total. The dose means and ranges to patient for each of these studies also are detailed. (Author)

[en] Velocity maps were studied combining Doyle and Mansfield method (1986) with each of the following transforms: Fourier, window Fourier and wavelet (Mexican hat). Continuous wavelet transform was compared against the two Fourier transform to determine which technique is best suited to study blood maps generated by Half Fourier Echo-Planar Imaging. Coefficient images were calculated and plots of the pixel intensity variation are presented. Finally, contour maps are shown to visualize the behavior of the blood flow in the cardiac chambers for the wavelet technique. (Author)

[en] In the present work it is proposed a method for the characterization of the irregularities present in the edges of malignant leisure of central nervous system over axial images generated through Nuclear magnetic Resonance by images. Through the use of techniques of digital images processing was possible to locate, extract and generate temporal series. These temporal series were utilized using the correlation dimension concept for producing a parameter which takes different values depending of the leisure type. It is demonstrated that this type of analysis suffers in a very acceptable form independently of the errors which can be generate by the fact that in the practice of temporal series obtained they are composed by a reduced number of points. (Author)

[en] In this work the experimental determination of correction factor for fluence divergence (kln) of linear Cs-137 sources CDCS J4, with Farmer ionization chamber model 2571 in a central and perpendicular plan to source axis, for distances range from 1 to 7 cm., has been presented. The experimental results were compared to calculating by Kondo and Randolph (1960) isotropic theory and Bielajew (1990) anisotropic theory. (Author)