Practice of Technological Process Monitoring in Production MBA

Technological process monitoring is the determination of nuclear materials parameters which allow the operations to be evaluated at any stage of the process. The monitoring objective is to localize nuclear material (NM) losses during the NM processing and to reveal the reasons for any anomaly. Ideally the NM balance would be performed by parameters of the materials loaded for a technological operation and measurement of the product at its completion. However under the conditions of constantly changing types of the raw materials to be processed at the operations, including some technological process stages, the balance can be performed only after completion of the whole technological cycle. This is because the ability to take measurements of the material as it moves through the process is limited. The duration of this cycle can be several days. The possibility of implementing a technological process monitoring program in a technological area (subarea) of a single MBA having a closed technological cycle was considered at FSUE “SRI SIA “LUCH”. In this case the total amount of the nuclear material available in the technological area during the shift was taken as a monitoring unit. The technological process monitoring in this case includes the following: - determination of the total NM amount (uranium mass, uranium-235 mass) available in the technological area at the shift beginning; - approval of a production task for the shift, issue of a direction for performing specific operations with NM; - making of a flow chart for the NM conversion during the shift; - breakdown of the technological processes into accounting data elements that should be reviewed; - determination of the NM documented inventory at the shift end; - determination of the NM physical inventory at the shift end; - determination of the control limits; - determination of the NM documented and physical inventories at the shift end; - determination of a “current” inventory difference; - revealing and analysis of any anomaly; - determination of measures and terms for the anomalies elimination. The report presents the results received in the course of the technological process monitoring in a single MBA at LUCH.