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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.
Rubin Goldstein, Louis M. Shotkin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 38 | Number 2 | November 1969 | Pages 94-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19513
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
By means of approximate numerical solutions obtained from a first-order correction to the prompt-jump approximation, good agreement is found with exact numerical solutions of the kinetics equations. Accuracies of <0.1% are obtainable for iterative time steps of as much as 1 sec, provided the reactor remains below prompt-critical [i.e., k(t) < $1]. The accuracy increases as l/β → 0, i.e., as the prompt-neutron lifetime becomes smaller or as the reactor becomes “faster.” This is true for both fast- and slow-reactivity insertion rates, C. Two methods for handling rapid reactivity insertion rates are discussed. One (Method A) is more applicable for C ≈ 1 → 50 $/sec, and the other (Method B, which effectively shifts the time scale) is more applicable for C ≳ 50 $/sec. In the one delayed-neutron-group approximation, analytic results are presented for arbitrary reactivity insertion rates and comparisons are made with previous methods.