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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.
HENRI B. SMETS
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 11 | Number 4 | December 1961 | Pages 428-433
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A26044
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stability and instability properties of homogeneous nuclear reactors with a single temperature coefficient of reactivity which is temperature dependent are studied by means of Liapounoff's Second Method. The special case of a temperature coefficient linearly dependent on temperature is solved completely for a space-independent model and it is shown that all solutions are bounded and tend asymptotically to a constant if the reactivity decreases as the temperature approaches large values. In some conditions, the reactor has two stable equilibrium points (bistable).