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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.
W. M. Lopez, J. R. Beyster
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 12 | Number 2 | February 1962 | Pages 190-202
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A26058
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron diffusion parameters in water have been measured at 26.7°C with the pulsed neutron technique. The results are 210 ± 1 µsec for the neutron mean lifetime, 37,503 ± 366 cm2 sec−1 for the average diffusion coefficient, and 5116 ± 776 cm4 sec−1 for the diffusion cooling constant. From these values the thermal absorption cross section of hydrogen and the thermal diffusion length in water can be inferred to be 325 ± 2 mb and 2.83 ± 0.02 cm, respectively. With a pulsed high-intensity neutron source provided by an electron linear accelerator, neutron lifetime measurements were performed on small and large water samples with values of the geometrical buckling from 0.014 cm−2 to 0.59 cm−2. Effects of harmonic modes in the large water geometries, which were determined by measurements of the time-dependent spatial flux distributions resulting from an external pulsed source of fast neutrons, were found to be adequately predictable with simple diffusion theory.