The Portable Spent Fuel Attribute Tester
A Gamma-ray spectra evaluation program.
Great success with Visual Prolog 5.1
I wrote and demonstarted a program written in Visual Prolog 5.1 in the
Paks Atomic Energy Plant
in the presence of the supervisors of the
International Atomic Energy Agency!
We had to put of all clothes and take white ones including gloves and helmets, and string to the stem of spectacles. A spectacle fallen in the resting basin of spent nuclear fuels means an accident reported to IAEA. While another colleagues: L. Lakosi, N. C. Tam, J. Zsigrai were putting a long tube filled with air to get stronger signals, I filled the program to the laptop, and showed to two inspectors of the IAEA.
[Place of photos about the staff and the equipment taken in the plant.]
Physical background:
The spent nuclear fuel rods are spending certain time under deep water within the plant. Colleagues from our institute worked out an equipment measure the characteristic gamma rays of the fission products of U-235 and Pu-239: Cs-134, Cs-137, Zr-95, and Ce-144. The equipment consists of long tubes filled with air driven over the spent fuel rods, a detector, a HP palmtop computer to collect the data, a HP Omnibook with Win 95 to evaluate the data. My task was to write a new program, using all GUI tricks of Windows, based on an old (sparsely documented) MS DOS Fortran one whose author was J. Safar who has left our
Institute of Isotope and Surface Chemistry of Chemical Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciencesto be a clerk of the Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority has never time to communicate. I managed to do it using Visual Prolog 5.1.
The IAEA inspectors stamped the whole equipment packed in two metallic boxes including the very expensive detector, admitting our measurement and evaluation method as official.
