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Task force charts growing interest in civilian maritime nuclear applications
Readers of Nuclear News will have heard of historical applications of civilian maritime nuclear power, like the merchant ship NS Savannah and the USS Sturgis floating power plant. With a few exceptions there has been little action in this area for over 50 years, and there are plenty of reasons and opinions as to why, but over the last few years the dramatic increase in interest from the maritime industry and its stakeholders has been undeniable.
Viktoriya V. Kulik, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 1 | May 2006 | Pages 69-89
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2596
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The presence of a localized spallation source in an accelerator-driven subcritical system leads to significant spatial variations in the power distribution and invalidates the simple point-kinetics approach. To eliminate higher-harmonics contamination in the detector response and to account properly for spatial and spectral effects in reactivity determination, a method directly combining measurements with numerical simulations of the experimental data is developed through a quasi-static formulation. The method provides space-time correction to a variety of traditional point-kinetics techniques and determines the reactivity essentially independent of the detector position, as long as sufficiently accurate information on the reactor configuration is provided. In the current work, the space-time corrections are derived for two well-known point-kinetics methods: area-ratio technique and -method. Numerical simulations performed with the FX2-TH diffusion theory code along with a space-time analysis of MUSE-4 pulsed source experimental data illustrate the applicability of the proposed methods for the determination of significant subcriticality levels in fast and thermal reactor systems.