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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. L. Dutré, A. F. Debosscher
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 3 | March 1977 | Pages 355-363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A26977
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents an exact and complete statistical analysis of the neutron density fluctuations resulting from Gaussian white reactivity noise in a point reactor model with proportional power feedback, but without delayed neutrons. The analysis includes the multiplicative effect of neutron density and reactivity variations. An exact solution of the time-independent Fokker-Planck equation is found, resulting in a gamma density function for the stationary first-order probability density of the power fluctuations. The time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation is solved for the Laplace transformed function, which can be written in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions. The subsequent inversion yields the transition probability density function. The most common first- and second-order statistical characteristics, such as moments, autocovariance function, and power spectral density, are calculated and compared to the results of a linearized analysis.