This study aimed to investigate the acrylamide content in frozen food products after cooking. Twenty samples of bread (Group 1) and 30 samples of processed tuberous and corn vegetable products (Group 2) were selected. Acrylamide levels were quantified using liquid chromatography tandem-mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The frozen food samples were heated using the air fryer cooking method according to the product packaging and were compared to ready-to-eat French fries (Group 3). The results showed that the acrylamide content was the highest in group 3, followed by that in group 2 and group 1. The acrylamide content of all the samples was found to be within the domestic recommended standard of 1 mg/kg. However, when the samples that exceeded EU benchmark level (0.5 mg/kg) were selected and cooked using the deep-fat frying method according to the product packaging, one of them showed the acrylamide content of 1.83 mg/kg, which exceeded the domestic recommended standard. The present study highlights the need for continued evaluation and management to reduce acrylamide contents in frozen foods, as increasing domestic exposure to acrylamide is concerning.

The United States enforces the seafood import regulations so-called the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), and by 2023, all exports of aquatic products and processed fish products by fisheries which have not obtained an “Comparability Finding” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be completely banned. Therefore, to respond to the US MMPA, it is critical to identify technologies and methods used in worldwide for reducing bycatch of marine mammals. In particular, marine mammals are frequently caught in five fisheries (trawl, gill net, trap, stow net and set net) in Korea, which is facing a great challenge. This study presented bycatch reduction methods by five fisheries, classified the methods by country, and suggested appropriate reduction methods which can be applied in Korea.

It is crucial to be sure about the safety of nuclear facilities for human resources who are in danger of radioactive emission, also diminishing the volume of the wastes that are buried under the ground. Chemical decontamination of nuclear facilities can provide these demands at the same time by dissolving the oxide layer, which radionuclides such as 60Co and 58Co have been penetrated, of parts that are utilized in nuclear plants. Although there are many commercial methods to approaching its aim and they perform a high decontamination factor, they have some issues such as applying organic acids which have the ability to chelate with radionuclides that can be washed by underground water, have large quantities of radioactive waste and damage to the surface by severe intergranular attack. A new method has been introduced by KAERI’s scientist which is named the HyBRID Process, in this process the main solution is the acidic form of Hydrazine. In this process, like other acid-washing processes, there is a chance of corrosion on the metal surface which is not desired. The metal surface is able to be protected during dissolving process by adding some organic and inorganic corrosion inhibitors such as PP2 and PP3. There is a very new research topic about ionic liquids (ILs) as corrosion inhibitors which illustrates a vast potential for this application due to their tunable nature and the variety of options for cationic and anionic parts. The key factors for ILs corrosion inhibitors such as the hardness properties are summarized. In this study, we review to the fundamentals and development of corrosion inhibitors for chemical decontamination and give an prospect with emphasis on the challenges to be overcome.

The presence of organic components in spent scintillation liquid should be considered during all steps of radioactive waste processing for final disposal. Scintillation liquids often referred to as cocktails are generated form radiochemical analyses of radionuclides, which mainly consists of mixtures of liquid organic materials such as toluene and xylene. Typical features of these liquid organic materials are volatility, combustibility and toxicity. These are the reason why special attention must be paid to the management of liquid organic radioactive wastes. To select an appropriate waste management strategy and to design the treatment process of spent scintillation cocktails, it is required to investigate the nature of the waste such as specific radioactivity and moisture content. The analysis results of spent scintillation liquid generated at Wolsong nuclear power plants will be discussed. An overview of the technical approaches available for the treatment of organic radioactive waste will be additionally provided.

The high-level nuclear waste (HLW) repository disposes of high-level nuclear waste at a depth of 500 m to 1,000 m underground. Structural health monitoring must be accompanied by the complex environmental conditions of high temperature, high humidity, radiation, and mechanical stress. A thermocouple for measuring temperature, total stress meter and pore pressure meter for measuring stress and water pressure, relative hygrometer and electrical resistivity sensor (TDR or SUS) for measuring humidity, accelerometer for measuring crack signals, and strain gauge for measuring displacement are used. For safety, after disposing of HLW in the HLW repository, access to the disposal tunnel gets blocked, making it impossible to replace or remove the monitoring sensors. So, it is necessary to evaluate the effect of the HLW repository’s environmental conditions on the monitoring sensors and enhance their durability through quantitative life evaluation and shielding. Before evaluating the life of accelerometers and strain gauges used in the HLW repository, an experimental study is conducted to determine failure modes and failure mechanisms under radiation conditions, which are unique environmental conditions of the HLW repository.

The final disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) will take place in a deep geological repository. The metal canister surrounding the SNF is made of cast iron and copper, designed to provide longterm containment of radionuclides. Canister is intended to be safeguarded by a multiple-barrier disposal system comprising engineered and natural barriers. Colloids and gases are mediators that can accelerate radionuclide migration and influence radionuclide behavior when radionuclides leak from the canister at the end of its service life. It is very important to consider these factors in the assessment of the long-term stability of deep dispoal repository. An experimental setup was designed to observe the acceleration of nuclide behavior due to gas-mediated transport in a simulated environment with specific temperature and pressure conditions, similar to those of a deep disposal repository. In this study, experiments were conducted to simulate gas flow within an engineered barrier under conditions reflecting 1000 years post repository closure. The experiment utilized bentonite WRK with a dry density of 1.61 g/cm³ after compaction. The compacted bentonite was subsequently saturated under a water pressure of 5 MPa, equivalent to the hydrostatic pressure found 500 meters underground. Gas was introduced into the saturated bentonite at different pressures to assess the permeation behavior of the bentonite relative to gas pressure variations. Consequently, it was observed that under specific pressures, gas permeated the saturated bentonite, ascending in the form of bubbles. Furthermore, it was noted that when a continuous flow was initiated within the bentonite, erosion took place, leading to the buoyant transportation of eroded particles upward by the bubbles. The particles transported by the bubbles had a relatively small particle size distribution, and cesium also tended to be transported by the bubbles and moved upward. When high-pressure gas is generated at the interface of the canister and the buffer, flow through the buffer can occur, and cationic nuclides such as cesium and strontium can be attached to the gas bubble and migrate. However, the pressure of the gas to break through the saturated buffer is very high, and the amount of cesium transported by the gas bubbles is very limited.

Considering the domestic situation where all nuclear power plants are located on seaside, the interim storage site is also likely to be located on coastal site. Maritime transportation is inevitable and the its risk assessment is very important for safety. Currently, there is no independently developed maritime transportation risk assessment code in Korea, and no research has been conducted to evaluate the release of radioactive waste due to the immersion of transport cask. Previous studies show that the release rate of radionuclides contained in a submerged transport cask is significantly affected by the area of flow path generated at the breached containment boundary. Due to the robustness of a cask, the breach is the most likely generated between the lid and body of cask. CRIEPI investigated the effect of cask containment on the release rate of radioactive contents into the ocean and proposed a procedure to calculate the release rate considering the socalled barrier effect. However, the contribution of O-ring on the release rate was not considered in the work. In this study, test and analysis is performed to determine the equivalent flow path gap considering the influence of O-rings. These results will be implemented in the computational model to assess sea water flow through a breached containment boundary using CFD techniques to assess radionuclide release rates. To evaluate the release rate as a function of lid displacement, a small containment vessel is engineered and a metal O-ring of the Helicoflex HN type is installed, which is the most commonly used one in transport and storage casks. The lid of containment vessel is displaced in vertical and horizontal direction and the release rate of the vessel was quantified using the helium leak test and the pressure drop test. Through this work, the relationship between the vertical opening displacement and horizontal sliding displacement of the cask lid and the actual flow path area created is established. This will be implemented in the CFD model for flow rate calculation from a submerged transport cask in the deep sea. In addition, the compression of the O-ring causes very small gaps, such as capillaries. In these cases, Poiseuille’s law is used to calculate the capillary flow rate.

Hydride reorientation is widely known as one of the major degradation mechanisms in Zirconium cladding during dry storage. Some previous theoretical models for hydride reorientation used assumption of an ideal radial basal pole orientation for HCP structure of Zirconium cladding. Under this assumption, circumferential hydride was considered to precipitate in the basal plane while radial hydride was considered to precipitate in the prismatic plane, thereby giving energetical penalty on thermodynamical precipitation of radial hydrides. However, in reality, reactor-grade Zirconium cladding exhibits average 30° tilted texture, adding complexity to the hydride precipitation mechanism. In this study, reactor-grade Zirconium cladding was charged with hydrogen and hydride reorientation -treated specimens were fabricated. Microstructural characterization of hydrides was conducted via following three methods in terms of interface and stored energy. And this study aimed to compare these characteristics between circumferential and radial hydrides. Using Electron Back Scattered Diffraction (EBSD), the interface was investigated assuming that interface lies parallel to the axial axis of the tube. These were further validated with Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM). In addition, Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) analysis was conducted to calculate the stored energy. This investigation is expected to establish fundamental understanding of how hydrides precipitate in Zirconium cladding with different orientations. And it will also increase the predictability of radial hydride formation and help understanding the mechanical behavior of Zirconium cladding with radial hydrides.

Nuclear safety, security, and safeguards (nuclear 3S) are essential components for establishing robust nuclear environments. Nuclear safety is to protect public and environments from radioactive contamination, which can be caused in accidents. Nuclear security is to protect nuclear facilities from terrorism or sabotage, which related to physical a ttacks or insider threats. And nuclear safeguards is to protect nuclear materials from extortion by a state with a purpose of weaponizing activities. When a new nuclear facility is introduced, it is possible to save abundant amount of resources by considering nuclear 3S in an early stage (design phases). Initially, the international atomic energy agency (IAEA) recommended safeguards-by-design (SBD) approach. The concept of SBD gradually expands to nuclear 3S-by-design (3SBD). Though there are differences in purpose and target subject, each nuclear ‘S’ is closely related with others. When introducing a certain technology or equipment in order to enhance one ‘S’, another ‘S’ also get affected. The effect can be synergies or conflicts. For instance, confidential information in nuclear security is required for a safeguards activity. On the contrary, inspection equipment for safeguards can be used for security. Pyroprocessing is a technology for managing used nuclear fuels. As pyroprocessing is a backend fuel cycle technology, a sensitive nuclear technology, safeguards has taken a large portion of nuclear 3S research in an effort to achieve international credibility and nuclear transparency. As mentioned, there are both synergies and conflicts in integrating nuclear 3S. In this study, we investigate potential challenges in applying nuclear 3S integration to pyroprocessing by addressing synergies and conflicts. This approach will suggest required supplementary methods to build the reliable pyroprocessing environment.

The Nuclear Export and Import Control System (NEPS) is currently in operation for nuclear export and import control. To ensure consistent and efficient control, various computational systems are either already in place or being developed. With numerous scattered systems, it becomes crucial to integrate the databases from each to maximize their utility. In order to effectively utilize these scattered computer systems, it is necessary to integrate the databases of each system and develop an associated search system that can be used for integrated databases, so we investigated and analyzed the AI language model that can be applied to the associated search system. Language Models (LM) are primarily divided into two categories: understanding and generative. Understanding Language Models aim to precisely comprehend and analyze the provided text’s meaning. They consider the text’s bidirectional context to understand its deeper implications and are used in tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, question answering, and named entity recognition. In contrast, Generative Language Models focus on generating new text based on the given context. They produce new textual content continuously and are beneficial for text generation, machine translation, sentence completion, and storytelling. Given that the primary purpose of our associated search system is to comprehend user sentences or queries accurately, understanding language models are deemed more suitable. Among the understanding language models, we examined BERT and its derivatives, RoBERTa and DeBERTa. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) uses a Bidirectional Transformer Encoder to understand the sentence context and engages in pre-training by predicting ‘MASKED’ segments. RoBERTa (A Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-training Approach) enhances BERT by optimizing its training methods and data processing. Although its core architecture is similar to BERT, it incorporates improvements such as eliminating the NSP (Next Sentence Prediction) task, introducing dynamic masking techniques, and refining training data volume, methodologies, and hyperparameters. DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention) introduces a disentangled attention mechanism to the BERT architecture, calculating the relative importance score between word pairs to distribute attention more effectively and improve performance. In analyzing the three models, RoBERTa and DeBERTa demonstrated superior performance compared to BERT. However, considering factors like the acquisition and processing of training data, training time, and associated costs, these superior models may require additional efforts and resources. It’s therefore crucial to select a language model by evaluating the economic implications, objectives, training strategies, performance-assessing datasets, and hardware environments. Additionally, it was noted that by fine-tuning with methods from RoBERTa or DeBERTa based on pre-trained BERT models, the training speed could be significantly improved.

This study analyzes the seismic response of traffic light poles, considering soil-foundation effects through nonlinear static and time history analyses. Two poles are investigated, uni-directional and bi-directional, each with 9 m mast arms. Finite element models incorporate the poles, soil, and concrete foundations for analysis. Results show that the initial stiffness of the traffic light poles decreases by approximately 38% due to soil effects, and the drift ratio at which their nonlinear behavior occurs is 77% of scenarios without considering soil effects. The maximum acceleration response increases by about 82% for uni-directional poles and 73% for bi-directional poles, while displacement response increases by approximately 10% for uni-directional and 16% for bi-directional poles when considering soil-foundation effects. Additionally, increasing ground motion intensity reduces soil restraints, making significant rotational displacement the dominant response mechanism over flexural displacement for the traffic light poles. These findings underscore the importance of considering soil-foundation interactions in analyzing the seismic behavior of traffic light poles and provide valuable insights to enhance their seismic resilience and safety.

We produced an activated carbon using sodium-lignosulfonate, in which we investigated how the sodium salt in lignin served as the activating agent during heat treatment. Our process resulted in a product with a high specific surface area of 1324 m2/ g at 800 °C and microporous structure. During the activation process, we observed the consumption of carbon due to the dehydration reaction of NaOH and the reduction of Na2CO3 to metallic Na, which created pores through oxidation/ reduction reactions. The intercalation of metallic Na between the lattices at high temperatures formed additional pores and increased the specific surface area. Our proposed mechanism holds promise for enhancing the control of the microstructure and porosity of activated carbons through the thermal treatment of biomass.

본 연구는 국내 가정에서 사용하고 있는 냉장고 및 냉 동고의 온도 분포에 대한 현황을 파악하기 위하여 냉장고 대상 25가구, 냉동고 대상 25가구를 선정하고 온도 측정 을 시행하였다. 가정용 냉장 및 냉동고의 실제 공간상의 온도 분포 조사 결과, 냉장고 대상 가구에서 측정된 온도 는 최저 -8.2oC, 최고 15.8oC, 평균 3.73oC로 조사되었으며, 공간 위치별 온도 분포는 문 보관 칸 5.06±1.69oC, 내부 벽면 4.18±1.19oC, 내부 보관함 3.41±1.36oC로 내부 보관함 의 온도가 가장 낮았고, 각 위치에서 상단 및 하단의 유의 적인 온도 차이는 문 보관 칸에서만 확인되었다(P<0.01). 냉 동고 대상 가구에서 측정된 온도는 최저 -30.3oC, 최고 0.7oC, 평균 -17.95oC로 조사되었으며, 공간 위치별 온도 분포는 문 보관 칸 -17.19±1.68oC, 내부 벽면 -17.81±1.07oC, 내부 보관함 -18.78±1.72oC로 냉장고 결과와 동일하게 내부 보 관함의 온도가 가장 낮고, 문 보관 칸에서만 상·하단의 유 의적인 온도 차가 확인되었다(P<0.01). 냉장·냉동고 내에 서 위치별 최대 온도 차이는 각각 2.18oC, 2.02oC로 확인 되었으며, 결론적으로 냉장·냉동고 전체의 온도가 일정하 게 유지되는 것이 아니며, 보관되는 위치별로 유의적인 편 차가 존재하는 것으로 나타났다. 이에 따라 냉장·냉동고 제조사와 공공기관에서 식품별 권장 보관 위치를 고객들 에게 적극적으로 권고하고, 각 가정에서는 온도 변화에 민 감한 식품을 보관할 경우 문쪽 보관을 지양하는 등 보관 관리 의식을 가져야 할 것으로 사료된다.

PURPOSES : This study aims to understand the effect of defective dowel bar installation on jointed concrete pavement (JCP), which can cause joint freezing, spalling, cracking, and faulting and finally shorten the lifespan of the pavement. METHODS : A comprehensive field survey was undertaken at an expressway construction site in South Korea to assess dowel bar installation conditions. In addition, finite element (FE) analysis was used to simulate JCP behavior with both vertical and horizontal dowel misalignments. Different temperature conditions, including a change of -55 °C and gradient of -0.1 °C/mm, were integrated into the FE model to examine horizontal slab contraction and simultaneous slab curling. RESULTS : The analysis revealed pronounced slab behaviors under specific temperature changes, particularly when combined with dowel misalignments. The simultaneous effects of horizontal contraction and slab curling owing to temperature changes and gradients became more evident in the presence of dowel misalignments. CONCLUSIONS : The results confirmed that dowel bar misalignment considerably affected the behavior of the JCP, thereby emphasizing the importance of the proper installation of dowel bars.

마늘은 백합과 알리움속에 속하는 영양체작물로 누대재배시 수확량이 감소하는 특성을 보인다. 마늘의 화경 끝에는 주아가 생성되는데, 주아를 파종하여 2년이상 누대재배시 수확량이 약 15% 이상 증가하기 때문에 주아재 배를 통한 종구 갱신이 필요하다. 마늘 주아를 수확 후 저장시 파총채벌레, 파좀나방 등이 발생하며, 저장 중 주아 는 매년 평균 20% 이상의 부패한다. 주아재배를 원활히 하기 위해 주아 저장 시 해충의 방제를 통해 부패율을 줄이는 것이 중요하다. 본 연구에서 주아에서의 해충 발생밀도 및 방제방법에 대한 연구를 진행하였다. 연구결과 주아에서 파총채벌레는 7월 3주차, 파좀나방은 7월 2주차에 각각 발생최성기를 보였으며, 약제 침지시 방제가가 90% 이상 관찰되었다. 약제 침지된 주아 파종시 약해는 발생하지 않아, 주아 해충 방제시 침지법을 활용하여 해충의 밀도를 조절 할 수 있을 것으로 판단된다.