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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.
I. Hill, N. Soppera, M. Bossant
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 280-294
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-37
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 2014 International Handbook of Evaluated Reactor Physics Benchmark Experiments (IRPhEP Handbook) spans over 30 000 pages and contains 136 evaluations. In the handbook, evaluations are grouped by reactor type (light water reactor, heavy water reactor, liquid metal cooled fast reactor, etc.) and contain up to ten different types of measurements, each of which can be applied to code and nuclear data validation. Despite the thoughtful organization and strict format rules for evaluations, identifying suitable validation cases remains challenging. To assist with searching and trending the IRPhEP Handbook, a relational database and user interface named IDAT (IRPhEP Database and Analysis Tool) was developed. IDAT was first distributed with the 2013 edition of the IRPhEP Handbook and will be updated annually as evaluations are added and revised. Data characterizing the measurements were extracted to allow for searching and trending in IDAT. Measurement types in the database include criticality, buckling, spectral characteristics, reactivity effects, reactivity coefficients, kinetics, reaction rates, and power distribution measurements. Additionally, the database contains calculated quantities, such as neutron flux/capture/fission spectrum data, neutron balance data, and keff sensitivity data, along with tools to visualize these data. IDAT can employ data to assist in the identification of similar experiments using a variety of metrics, within a “Rank Similar” pane. For each measurement in the database, there is also a “Trending” pane, allowing multilevel plots of calculated over experimental values allowing users to drill down by applying various filters. This paper describes the creation of IDAT as well as its features.