How does KEP Technologies meet the challenges of the nuclear sector?

Date: 15.04 - Categories: Brands / Engineering

KEP Technologies, through its various brands and activities, helps its customers in the nuclear sector to meet their challenges. These challenges require the use of specific solutions that involve the Group’s expertise, innovation capabilities, diversified skills, certifications (CEFRI) and project management methods.

Management of nuclear projects

To illustrate our engineering capabilities, but also our solutions for radioactivity measurement, material characterization, industrial control, design and production of metal assemblies, we take the example of the fuel life cycle.

Challenge – 1. Extraction

The uranium mine concentrate, or “yellow cake,” must be converted to be exploitable. To do this, it undergoes a series of chemical treatment processes. Thermal analysis, as proposed by Setaram, makes it possible to characterize/simulate/optimize the various gas-solid reactions involved in these processes.

Challenge – 2. Enrichment

To be usable in a reactor, uranium must first be converted into gas and then concentrated into the isotope 235, or enriched. This enrichment process is performed after the uranium has been converted into gas. KEP Technologies provides thermal flow measurement solutions, a non-intrusive, in-line measurement method that can operate at the low pressures required by these processes.

Challenge – 3. Fuel fabrication and use in reactors

KEP Technologies’ solutions are used at several stages. In the research and development phases, thermophysical characterization of new fuels allows to anticipate their behavior in a reactor. The parameters measured include expansion or heat capacity under temperature and atmosphere conditions close to those of the reactor.

The core of a nuclear reactor is a complex mechanical assembly made up of a multitude of parts. In manufacturing, the dimensional control of these components ensures the functionality of the system once assembled. Our Setsmart solutions allow a simple and precise control. For example, they can be applied to the thickness control of fuel pellets in order to avoid stacking with too much play or tightness and the premature mechanical aging effects that could result.

fuel-fabrication-setaram-setsmart-nuclear

Challenge – 4. Sorting

Materials and wastes from nuclear activities must be sorted before being processed, stored or permanently disposed of. National and international authorities recommend characterizing these materials and wastes in order to choose the most appropriate management methods. KEP Technologies provides complete characterization solutions perfectly adapted to the constraints of its customers.
Among our engineering achievements, we provide stations allowing the opening of historical waste drums and the sorting of their contents. These are fully automated and require minimal human intervention, thus ensuring optimal radiological protection of the operators.

Challenge – 5. Recycling

When they are no longer sufficiently efficient, the nuclear fuel rods must be removed from the reactor and replaced with new fuel. They must then undergo a number of manipulations and treatments before being recycled and thus reused in the reactor. One of these steps is simply to clean them. But this operation, generally manual, is very delicate and presents significant radiological risks. KEP Technologies has the capabilities and technologies to automate and therefore secure this operation.

Challenge – 6. Storage

The monitoring and safety of the storage of radioactive substances are the responsibility of the facility operators. They are subject to increasingly stringent requirements, in particular post-Fukushima measures, which make the facilities resistant to natural disasters. We support them with our manual or automated storage solutions which ensure the safety of the installation from the design stage and which allow the optimization of its organization and operation. These solutions are based on our nuclear engineering skills and the metal fabrication capabilities of KEP Metal Solutions.