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DOE selects first companies for nuclear launch pad
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced their first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad: three companies developing microreactors and one developing fuel supply.
The four companies—Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy, and Radiant Industries—were selected from the initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to the launch pad.
Anil Kumar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 82 | Number 3 | December 1982 | Pages 354-358
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A19396
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the considerations of recriticality of molten fuel assemblies, the presence of bubbles in the fuel plays an important role. In such a situation, there are two opposing contributions to reactivity from (a) the phenomenon of neutron streaming in bubbles (negative contribution) and (b) the phenomenon of changing neutron self-multiplication in the fuel (positive contribution). It is not possible to accurately calculate the individual reactivity contributions of the two phenomena using multidimensional transport theory or Monte Carlo codes. A simple diffusion theory expression given by Nicholson and Goldsmith for estimating reactivity contribution due to neutron streaming alone has been used extensively. As a part of the present contribution, first an attempt has been made to improve the applicability of the Nicholson-Goldsmith work by expressing extrapolation length in terms of the root-mean-square free path in the assembly. It is found that the application of the Trombay criticality formula, particularly its “modified Wigner rational variant,” leads to an expression for bubble reactivity worth, due to neutron streaming alone, that yields the closest agreement with the bubble worth values computed from the two-dimensional transport theory code TWOTRAN and the Monte Carlo code KENO.