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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.
Kazuo Shin, Hideo Hirayama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 120 | Number 3 | July 1995 | Pages 211-222
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An approximating formula recently proposed by the authors for gamma-ray buildup factors of multilayered shields is applied to point isotropic source problems.The formula, which is formulated in vector form with a four-group approximation, handles the gamma-ray energy spectrum directly and uses the transmission and albedo matrices to take gamma-ray transmission and back-scattering effects into consideration. The gamma-ray transmission and back-scattering probabilities through a 1-mean-free-path- (mfp-) thick shell depend on the shell curvature. This phenomenon plays an important role in simulating the gamma-ray buildup factor in point isotropic source geometry. In this model, the dependence is described by simplified expressions. The feasibility of the formula for systematically describing the point isotropic buildup factors was tested by using buildup factors calculated by the Monte Carlo method as reference data. The materials used in the tests were water, iron, and lead, and the source energies assumed were 0.5, 1, and 10MeV. Through the tests, the method was found to reproduce the reference data of double-layered shields of these materials very well. With the same parameters, the buildup factors of three-layered shields are also reproducible. Buildup factors computed with two different group structures were examined to test the adequacy of the energy group structure adopted. The group structure previously adopted was found to be adequate in the energy range of 0.5 to 10 MeV