Technical Meeting on Commercial Products and Services of
Research Reactors

28 June–2 July, 2010, IAEA, Vienna

The Vienna University of Technology (VUT) operates a 250 kW TRIGA Mark II research reactor at the Atominstitut (ATI) since March 1962. This reactor is uniquely devoted to nuclear education and training with the aim to offer an instrument to perform academic research and training. During the past decade a number of requests to the Atominstitut asked for the possibility to offer this reactor for external training courses. Over the years, such courses have been developed as regular courses for students during their academic curricula at the VUT/ATI. The courses cover such subjects as “Reactor physics and kinetics”, and “Reactor instrumentation and control”, in total about 20 practical exercises. Textbooks have been developed in English language for both courses. Target groups for commercial courses are other universities without an access to research reactors (i.e., the Technical University of Bratislava, Slovak Republic, or the University of Manchester, UK), international organisations (i.e., IAEA Dept of Safeguards, training section), research centres (ie. Mol, Belgium) for retraining of their reactor staff or nuclear power plants for staff retraining. These courses have been very successful during the past five years in such a manner that the Atominstitut has now to decline new course applications as the reactor is also used for Masters thesis and PhD work which requires full power operation while courses require low power operation. The paper describes typical training programs, target groups and possible transfers of these courses to other reactors.

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