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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.
Karl O. Ott
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 99 | Number 1 | May 1988 | Pages 13-27
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A23541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The longer term response of oxide- and metal-fueled liquid-metal-cooled reactors to unscrammed loss-of-flow and loss-of-heat-sink failures is investigated. The investigation consists of a review of numerical transient calculations performed by the Argonne National Laboratory Reactor Analysis and Safety Division, and of analytical analyses of semiasymptotic states. The emphasis is on the identification and evaluation of an inherent shutdown state for metal fuel, with its high heat conductivity, as an alternative to the familiar low-power asymptotic critical state. Design implications for retaining the inherently effected shutdown for a sufficiently long period are discussed and quantitatively evaluated. In addition, the effect of uncertainties of reactivity coefficients on predictions for such unscrammed transients is investigated. It is shown how measurements during a preoperational safety demonstration phase can validate and possibly correct those predictions.