Feasibility studies on the burnup measurement of fuel pebbles with HPGe gamma spectrometer

The feasibility of utilizing a High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector for the fuel element burnup measurement in a future Modular Pebble Bed Reactor (MPBR) was studied. First, the HPGe spectrometer was set-up for running the detector at high count rates while keeping the energy resolution adequately high to discriminate the Cs-137 peak from other interfering peaks. Based on these settings, the geometrical conditions are settled. Next, experiments were performed with Co-60 and Cs-137 sources to mimic the counting rates in real applications. With the aid of KORIGEN and MCNP/G4 simulations, it was demonstrated that the uncertainty of the Cs-137 counting rate can be well controlled within 3.5%. Finally, a full size prototype was tested in comparison with detailed Monte Carlo simulation and the efficiency transfer method was further utilized for efficiency calibration. To reduce the uncertainty in the efficiency transfer process, a standard point source embedded in a graphite sphere was used for efficiency calibration. The correction factor due to pebble self-attenuation was carefully studied.