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Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Breaking ground on a new approach to construction
The drive to Kairos Power’s reactor demonstration site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is not only scenic—it’s historic. Nearly 85 years ago, roughly 30,000 construction workers transformed orchards and farmland into a key Manhattan Project site. Depending on your route, you may pass by one of the three gatehouses that were once military checkpoints controlling access to Atomic Energy Commission production facilities.
Burt A. Zolotar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 2 | February 1968 | Pages 282-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18240
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The one-mode stochastic nuclear reactor model has been proposed by Bell to study fluctuations in neutron populations. The purpose of this model is to allow consistent space and energy corrections to point reactor stochastic results. The model has been extended to also cover fluctuations in captures and fissions. A time-dependent, Monte Carlo computer program has been developed to simulate these fluctuations for a one-velocity bare reactor system and to estimate parameters of the probability distributions. It has been shown that the one-mode model for neutron populations and captures gives excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo results. Both showed a correction of about 50% to the magnitude of the variance predicted by basic point reactor equations. The fission probabilities required a more careful examination, but the Monte Carlo results could be predicted by approximate solutions to the exact stochastic equations. The influence of spatial effects on the properties of persisting and nonpersisting chains in supercritical systems has also been examined. The one-mode model provides important corrections.