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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.
Kevin T. Clarno, Marvin L. Adams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 149 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 182-196
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE04-31
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present recent improvements in assembly-level calculations for reactor analysis, including modifications that support core-level analysis by quasi-diffusion. Our main focus is on accurately approximating the effects that neighboring assemblies have on the few-group cross sections, assembly discontinuity factors, form factors, and other transport parameters of a given assembly. We show that we can do this by using albedo boundary conditions that are estimated with low computational cost. We also present an efficient way to tabulate these effects to permit accurate interpolation by the core-level algorithm. We describe our algorithms and present results from several difficult test problems containing mixed-oxide and UO2 assemblies. Our methodology significantly reduces the largest errors made by present-day methodology. For example, in our test problems it reduces the maximum pin-power error by a factor of ~5.