The reactor is operated when required for a student laboratory exercise or a research experiment. Accordingly, operation at 100 kW power for many hours is quite rare; on the average, it occurs once a week. As a fortunate consequence, burnup is very low: only 0.56% of the ²³⁵U has been used up and 3.4 g ²³⁹Pu and 12.3 g fission products have accumulated. Therefore, there has been no need to replace any of the fuel assemblies since 1971.

The reactor is used, among others, in the following fields:

• activation analysis for radiochemistry and archeological research
• analysis of environmental samples
• determination of uranium content of rock samples
• biomedical applications (BNCT)
• nuclear instrument development and testing
• experiments in reactor physics and thermohydraulics
• development and testing of neutron tomographic methods for safeguards purposes
• development of noise diagnostic methods, isotope production and investigation of radiation damage to instruments/equipment






Chapter 6/ page 3 of 6