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Fuel and the nuclear resurgence: The chicken or the egg conundrum
Nuclear power currently appears to have the wind at its back, with growing demand for clean, reliable energy from industry (think data centers) and strong political support for new projects. But getting there still will require a lot of pieces to yet fall into place. It is, as American Nuclear Society CEO Craig Piercy said, a “chicken and egg” problem: Which comes first, the fuel to supply new reactors or the reactors that will create a demand for new fuel?
K. F. Hansen, B. V. Koen, W. W. Little, Jr.,
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 22 | Number 1 | May 1965 | Pages 51-59
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A19762
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A numerical procedure for the integration of the reactor kinetics equation is developed. It has the property of being numerically unconditionally stable for all values of the reactivity or integration-step size. The basic assumption of the method is that the neutron and precursor densities behave exponentially with a frequency characteristic of the asymptotic frequency corresponding to the reactivity. As a consequence of the assumption, and the factoring of the kinetics equation, it is then shown that for constant reactivity the asymptotic numerical eigensolution is exactly the asymptotic eigensolution of the differential kinetics equations. Thus, for constant reactivity, the asymptotic numerical solution can be shown to differ from the asymptotic analytic solution by at most a constant factor, proportional to ht2, for all time.