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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.
P. Wälti
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 2 | May 1969 | Pages 133-142
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A19713
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The mathematical model of age-dependent branching processes is used to describe neutron slowing down and multiplication in an infinite medium. To construct the probability measure of the neutron branching process, it is necessary to determine the probability density for a neutron of age θ(=time elapsed since birth of the fission neutron) to have energy E. This problem, which is equivalent to the time-dependent slowing down problem, is solved for a scattering law of the form v(E)Σs(E → E′)dE′ = aEµh(E′/E) (dE′/E) and an absorption cross section satisfying the relation v(E) Σa(E) = bEµ + c. In this case, it is proved that there always exist particular “invariant” probability densities suffering only contraction during ageing, i.e., having the form . For the time-dependent slowing down problem with a Greuling-Goertzel kernel, the results are compared with those of Koppel. Particular attention is paid to stationary energy spectra.