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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Antonio F. Dias, Laurance D. Eisenhart, Ronald E. Engel, Lance J. Agee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 3 | March 1998 | Pages 346-358
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2846
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The rod ejection accident in a pressurized water reactor and the control rod drop accident in a boiling water reactor are analyzed in this paper, both in a best-estimate (realistic) and a conservative manner. CORETRAN, a modern three-dimensional time-dependent nodal code, is used for all simulations. In all considered cases, the resulting peak fuel enthalpy is far less than the current licensing limit of 180 cal/g. The advantage of using a three-dimensional code over the classical point-kinetics approach can be summarized: The power peak is nominally a factor of 10 times lower, and the pulse is 10 times wider. Therefore, a three-dimensional approach predicts a much milder event. Sensitivity studies were performed to identify the influence of several parameters on the reactivity insertion simulations.