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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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New coolants, new fuels: A new generation of university reactors
Here’s an easy way to make aging U.S. power reactors look relatively youthful: Compare them (average age: 43) with the nation’s university research reactors. The 25 operating today have been licensed for an average of about 58 years.
Hiroshi Mitani
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 51 | Number 2 | June 1973 | Pages 180-188
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE51-180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A higher order perturbation formula for calculating changes in the reactivity up to a desired order in concise form is given; the formula uses the iterative technique well known in quantum mechanics and in the neutron life-cycle method. This procedure is possible only when the adjoint flux in the unperturbed system is used as the weighting function. The higher order perturbation formula contains the interaction between the perturbation inserted and its surrounding medium, but it consists only of the integration over the perturbed region. Numerical calculations up to the third-order perturbation show that the first-order perturbation technique gives a low value for the reactivity worths of fission, absorption, and scattering materials; further, the n’th-order perturbation is proportional to the n’th power of the concentration of an inserted perturbation.