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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.
N. C. FRANCIS, H. HURWITZ, JR., P. F. ZWEIFEL
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 2 | Number 3 | May 1957 | Pages 253-287
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE57-A25395
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The calculation of critical parameters, neutron distributions, and adjoint functions for reflected reactors is discussed. A variational technique and a modification of the Wiener-Hopf method are described. The major application is made for the case of reactors moderated by hydrogen, in which case the slowing-down kernel must be introduced either as a numerical function or as a polynomial fit to such a function. For the case of the polynomial fit, explicit formulas for critical size, neutron distributions, and adjoint functions have been found by the Wiener-Hopf method. A comparison with experimental results for water-moderated reactors shows discrepancies consistent with the discrepancy known to exist between the measured and calculated neutron age in water.