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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.
J. M. Kontoleon
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 70 | Number 3 | June 1979 | Pages 315-317
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A20155
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This Note analyzes the availability of supervised protective systems for nuclear reactors. Failure and repair times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. The availability is maximized, subject to a given fixed amount of resources, by determining the optimum distribution of resources between supervision and repair facilities and by selecting the optimum active-inactive times of the supervisor. The mathematical formulation employs a Markov model continuous in time and alternating between two and three discrete states. Maximization of availability is achieved by using a modified pattern search technique. Computer results illustrate the usefulness of the approach.