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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.
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.