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Two steps forward for U.K. advanced nuclear
This week, two significant announcements have emerged from the United Kingdom’s advanced reactor sector.
On June 14, Rolls-Royce, the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory, and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency announced that they had signed two trilateral memorandums of cooperation to collaborate on “advanced modular reactor (AMR) technology, specifically high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGR), and the coated particle fuel these reactors will use.”
Separately, on June 16, Bellevue, Wash.–based TerraPower announced that its Natrium reactor design has been formally submitted for U.K. regulatory review. The company also announced the formation of a new subsidiary, TerraPower UK Ltd.
W. W. Graham, III, D. S. Harmer, C. E. Cohn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 1 | October 1969 | Pages 33-41
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The familiar rod-drop method for determining delayed-neutron parameters has been refined with new techniques of data collection, analysis, and correction. Values for a highly enriched uranium, heavy-water reactor have been obtained which have a general applicability because they have been accurately corrected for reactor power history, post-shutdown sub-critical neutron multiplication, and finite rod-drop time. Neutron flux after shutdown by rod drop in the Georgia Tech Research Reactor was monitored for periods in excess of three days using two detectors operated in parallel. One detector used a thermal-neutron-sensitive scintillator, the other a fission chamber. Flux-decay data were fit by weighted least squares using the Variable Metric Minimization method. This method was able to fit all the data simultaneously without limit on the number of fitting parameters. The most statistically-significant fit was obtained with 13 delayed-neutron groups, one of which was attributed to background due to its negligibly small decay constant. A fitting expression was used which accurately described the data collection process in which each data point was taken as the time integral of the flux over a finite time interval. The results are compared with values which have been obtained by small irradiated uranium samples and with decay-constant values in the last reported heavy-water in-reactor determination. There are indications that delayed-neutron effectiveness is enhanced by ∼3% in this type of reactor and that the effectiveness of photoneutron groups is decreased by ∼28% because of attenuation of high-energy gamma rays.