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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.
Liu Xiaobo, Fan Xiaoqiang, Peng Xianjue, Du Jinfeng, Gao Hui
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 179 | Number 2 | February 2015 | Pages 119-129
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-30
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel experimental method is introduced for effectively validating neutron initiation probability, through which the delayed neutron influence on the source strength can be neglected—this is the main reason for substantially explaining the burst waiting time experiments performed in the Godiva and Caliban burst reactors. The key idea of the new method is that the burst is initiated by simultaneously injecting a pulse of neutrons with appropriate strength just as the reactor achieves prompt supercritical and tallied by judging whether or not the burst is initiated by the pulsed neutrons based on the measured data. The principle of the method is described using initiation theory. The Chinese Fast Burst Reactor–II (CFBR-II) structure and two sets of configurations for preliminary experiments are then described. Last, those two sets of preliminary experiments are carried out on CFBR-II in the state of 0.042 $ prompt supercritical, and results, including the typical picture and other important measured data, are provided in order to illustrate how the initiation probability can be validated. The initiation probability of 0.43 was determined by preliminary performing of 65 bursts, which is an ∼35% relative difference between the theoretic calculations and the experimental results. Some discussion and suggestions for possible follow-on work are provided.