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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Y. S. Rana, S. B. Degweker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 162 | Number 2 | June 2009 | Pages 117-133
Technical Papers | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-13
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In our earlier papers, we developed a theory of reactor noise for accelerator-driven systems (ADSs). It was shown that reactor noise in ADSs is different from that in critical or radioactive source-driven subcritical systems because of the periodically pulsed source and its non-Poisson character. Various noise descriptors, such as Rossi alpha, Feynman alpha (or variance to mean), power spectral density, and cross-power spectral density, were derived, for a periodically pulsed source, including correlation between different pulses and finite pulses of different shapes. Throughout the work we restricted ourselves to the case of prompt neutrons only. In the present paper, we extend the theory to the delayed neutron case. Feynman-alpha and Rossi-alpha formulas are derived by considering the source to be a periodically pulsed non-Poisson source, without correlations between different pulses. Each pulse is assumed to be a delta function. The calculations are carried out in the time domain that leads to closed-form expressions for these descriptors.