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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
S. B. Degweker, Y. S. Rana
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 169 | Number 3 | November 2011 | Pages 296-313
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-54
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reactor noise in accelerator-driven systems (ADSs) is different from that in critical or radioactive source-driven subcritical systems because of the periodically pulsed source and its non-Poisson character. In two earlier papers, we developed a theory of ADS reactor noise, incorporating these features. The non-Poisson character of the source does not permit the use of the forward Kolmogorov equation or the Bartlette formula, two commonly used techniques in traditional noise theory. The method used in these papers was a probability-generating function combined with the linear character of the reactor noise in zero-power systems. In this paper we develop the Langevin approach to reactor noise in ADSs. Apart from being simpler, the Langevin approach allows treatment of feedback effects arising in ADSs with significant power as well as other noise sources, if any. We demonstrate that it is possible to obtain the correct expressions for various noise descriptors using this approach. The method is then applied to treat correlated non-Poisson pulsed sources with a finite pulse width including delayed neutrons. The present paper complements and expands our earlier discussions of ADS reactor noise.