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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.
Richard M. Lell
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 326-334
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-16
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ZPPR-12 experiments conducted by Argonne National Laboratory were designed to study sodium void worth, cell heterogeneity, and neutron streaming. The small core made it possible to conduct sodium void and neutron streaming experiments over the entire core. The simple, clean, single-zone core had no internal structures such as internal blankets or control rods to affect measurements or complicate interpretation of experimental results. Criticality and selected sodium void worth measurements were evaluated for ZPPR-12, and a detailed uncertainty analysis was performed for the measurements chosen for the benchmark. Highly detailed as-built models were developed for all configurations selected for the benchmark. A simplified RZ model was also created for the criticality benchmark. MCNP5 calculations with ENDF/B-VII.0 data for the benchmark models show generally good agreement between calculated and benchmark values for keff and sodium void worth.