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DOE selects first companies for nuclear launch pad
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced their first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad: three companies developing microreactors and one developing fuel supply.
The four companies—Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy, and Radiant Industries—were selected from the initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to the launch pad.
S. C. Wilson, S. R. Biegalski, R. L. Coats
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 157 | Number 3 | November 2007 | Pages 344-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The primary shutdown mechanism of all-metal nuclear assemblies engaging in pulsed operations is thermal expansion of the fuel material. Typically, a fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity is acquired by building the apparatus and fitting the operational data to the Nordheim-Fuchs kinetics equations. This value may vary as a function of reactivity insertion because of thermomechanical effects in the fuel material, which leads to uncertainty regarding untested reactor designs. This paper presents a computational method for modeling power, temperature, and thermoelastic displacement behavior of a spherical Godiva-like assembly during a prompt supercritical excursion and provides a way of determining fuel temperature coefficients of reactivity without the use of operational data.