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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.
J. E. Houghtaling, J. E. Grund
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 412-426
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18738
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reactor kinetics investigations have been performed for cold-start-up, hot-start-up, hot-standby, and operating-power reactivity accidents using the UO2-fueled, pressurized-water type SPERT-III reactor. Power excursion behavior was predicted for every SPERT-III experiment by digital computer calculations using the SPERT-developed PARET code. Extrapolations for severe cold-start-up excursion consequences were obtained from severe transient tests on SPERT-III fuel samples in the SPERT-IV capsule driver core. Analyses of the SPERT-III data show that prompt moderator heating was as significant as the Doppler effect in limiting the magnitude of power excursions in the SPERT-III core at operating temperatures. Comparisons of calculations and experimental data demonstrate that PARET is capable of predicting power excursion behavior in SPERT-III within experimental uncertainty for the range of conditions investigated. The SPERT-III integral-core tests also provide a broad base of experimental data for demonstrations of the capabilities of other existing models in predicting non-damaging power excursion behavior in UO2-fueled reactors.