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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
Gregory D. Spriggs
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 114 | Number 4 | August 1993 | Pages 342-351
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-78
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An-in-pile experimental technique to measure the decay constants and the relative abundances of the delayed neutron groups applicable for a given reactor system is presented. The method is based on a least-squares-fitting technique that simultaneously fits a series of transients produced by small reactivity perturbations to a reactor operating initially at delayed critical. The function that is least-squares fit is the analytic solution (written in terms of an arbitrary number of delayed neutron groups) as obtained by the point reactor model for the reactor response following a step change in reactivity. The application of the method does not require any knowledge of the size of the reactivity perturbations, and the method is independent of the detector efficiency. The results are based solely on the measurable quantities of relative power, time, and one measurable root of the Inhour equation.