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Tag: reactor kinetics

Why don’t nuclear reactors go kaboom? A reactor kinetics primer part – 2

Advanced test reactor Foto: Matt Howard, Source: Wikimedia Licens: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 generic

Its time for some more fun with reactor kinetics, in the last post we ended by looking at the point kinetics equation with one group of delayed neutrons. In this post as I promised we will talk about reactivity feedbacks. To brush up your memory, reactivity is defined as:

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Why don’t nuclear reactors go kaboom? A reactor kinetics primer part – 1

Nuclear reactors contain tons of fissile material and nuclear bombs contain only kilograms of fissile materials, so why does one of them explode with enough force to flatten a city but the other doesn’t? I will pull out some latex skillz and geek it out with equations to describe the physics behind whats in nuclear engineering is called reactivity excursions or RIA (Reactivity Insertion Accident). The level of these blog posts will be such that an interested and fairly math savy person can understand and calculate these kind of things on their own.

Castle Romeo photo: United States Department of Energy, Source: Wikimedia

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