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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.
G. C. Pomraning, Robert Rulko, Bingjing Su
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 1 | September 1994 | Pages 1-23
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A19018
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It has recently been argued that in planar geometry, P2 theory is more accurate (but no more complex) than P1 (diffusion) theory as an approximation to transport theory. This argument was based upon analytic comparisons as well as results from numerical test problems. On the analytic side, the P2 fundamental decay length is more accurate than the corresponding P1 decay length. One of the purposes of this paper is to show that the P2 expansion is, in fact, the optimal choice taken from a large family of expansions in predicting this decay length. Further, P2 theory exhibits scalar flux discontinuities at material interfaces, which can be considered as accounting for internal transport boundary layers. By contrast, the P1 scalar flux is everywhere continuous. The main purpose of this paper is to present an entire family of diffusion equations that contain flux discontinuities at material interfaces All members of this family predict the exact transport fundamental decay length (the discrete Case eigenvalue). One preferred member of this family is shown to be exceedingly accurate in predicting various transport theory behavior for homogeneous source-free problems. The formalism used to derive these diffusion theories is the variational calculus, including boundary considerations that lead to the diffusive boundary conditions.