Numerical evaluation of the production of radionuclides in a nuclear reactor (Part II).

A computer program called LAURA has been developed to predict the production 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 the Rubinson (1949) approach is used to evaluate the depletion function. In this paper (Part II), we describe the full simulation of radionuclide production including the decomposition of a reaction network into independent linear chains, provisions for periodic reactor shutdown and restart, and implementation of an approximate solution given by Raykin and Shlyakhter (1989) to account for the effect of feedback due to alpha decay. Also included are some examples which demonstrate possible uses for LAURA.