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Task force charts growing interest in civilian maritime nuclear applications
Readers of Nuclear News will have heard of historical applications of civilian maritime nuclear power, like the merchant ship NS Savannah and the USS Sturgis floating power plant. With a few exceptions there has been little action in this area for over 50 years, and there are plenty of reasons and opinions as to why, but over the last few years the dramatic increase in interest from the maritime industry and its stakeholders has been undeniable.
M. M. R. Williams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 2 | June 2011 | Pages 138-150
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-45
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The aqueous homogeneous reactor has assumed some importance in recent years as a potential medical isotopes production system. The kinetic behavior of such systems depends on the rate of generation of the radiolytic gas bubbles and the associated reactivity void coefficient. In this work we describe a method based on perturbation theory, and a simple description of bubble production, for deriving a value of the void coefficient of reactivity. It is shown that, in the small void fraction limit, the void coefficient is dependent only on the system properties and does not depend on power level or the bubble properties. Values are given for the void coefficient for a range of parameters assuming that the voids are distributed in three different ways, i.e., uniformly, proportional to power, and equal to the distribution due to buoyancy. The results are in reasonable agreement with values obtained by others, using more detailed methods, based on the reactors SILENE and MIPR.