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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Douglas C. Hunt
Nuclear Technology | Volume 30 | Number 2 | August 1976 | Pages 138-165
Technical Paper | Criticality Array Data and Calculational Method / Chemical Processing | doi.org/10.13182/NT76-A31613
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The methods commonly used in this country to evaluate the criticality safety of fissile material arrays include density analog , surface density, equilateral hyperbola, albedo, and solid-angle techniques. These can be divided into array unit interaction and semiempirical methods. The albedo and solid-angle techniques fall into the former class; the rest fall into the latter class. A study reveals that interaction methods are useful in treating arrays of arbitrary mesh patterns (e.g., triangular or hexagonal) having only a few units, while the semiempirical techniques are more applicable to arrays with a large number of units. The density analog and surface density approaches are easy to apply but typically require more auxiliary calculations, while other methods are more difficult to use, but more broadly applicable. None of the methods satisfactorily handle nonuniformly spaced arrays, arrays with arbitrary amounts of internal moderator, or “clumped” arrays, i.e., arrays of arrays. Most of the methods have some provision for treating mixed arrays, but these provisions often do not apply to arrays of arbitrarily arranged fast (e.g., metal) and slow (e.g., solution) units.