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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Benjamin Lilley, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1902-1910
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2171273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A many-reactor power plant with a shared used fuel pool presents significant challenges and a novel opportunity for fuel management optimization. We develop a Python package and interface it with optimization software and core modeling software to automate exploration of the design space for the multireactor multicycle problem. A genetic algorithm is used to search the core reload design space for a two-reactor system, with and without used fuel sharing. With equal computational effort, we find that the fuel-sharing strategy slightly lowers cost.