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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.
S. A. Hasnain, D. Okrent
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 9 | Number 3 | March 1961 | Pages 314-322
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A25882
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The performance of some blanket designs is studied using economically optimized cycling based on a simple economics model. For an 800-liter core fast reactor having a 45-cm radial blanket and an average core power of 1-Mw per liter, it appears that the outermost blanket elements make enough plutonium to pay for the cost of their fabrication and processing, unless the core power density falls well below the expected value. A cyclic motion of elements in the inward radial direction has little effect on the economics if optimum cycling is followed. Moving the blanket elements may have engineering advantages however, such as a uniform buildup and burnup, and less variation in power locally with time. A paste blanket with radial inward motion and axial mixing has a similar behavior. Inclusion of moderating material in a fast reactor blanket is not promising for a high-power density reactor using optimum cycling, but it may prove valuable if blanket fluxes get very low or the residence times of the blanket elements are limited.