nuclear cross sections that determine core multiplication strongly depend on core temperature (e.g., the doppler, moderator density effects etc). on the other hand, since this heat is generated by the neutron flux in the reactor core, the temperature distribution in the core will depend heavily on its neutronic behavior. fuel centerline temperature could be the limiting constraint on reactor po...

In the first half of the 20 century nuclear fusion and fission were both seen as processes that could potentially be harnessed as a powerful energy source. Research into fusion began in the 1920’s, but it was too technically challenging to make a working fusion reactor. Fission developed much more successfully during the Second World War, when North America’s Manhattan Project attempted to use ...

Nuclear accidents that lead to melting of a reactor core create heterogeneous materials containing hundreds of radionuclides, many with short half-lives. The long-lived fission products and transuranium elements within damaged fuel remain a concern for millennia. Currently, accurate fundamental models for the prediction of release rates of radionuclides from fuel, especially in contact with wat...

-Some early reactor accidents are recalled together with their associated environmental consequences. One such consequence is the generation of radioactive aerosol. We describe the various physical processes that such an aerosol cloud undergoes within the secondary containment building. These physical processes are then brought together quantitatively in a balance equation for the aerosol size ...

The loading pattern of fuel bundles in a reactor core determines the characteristics of the reloading cycle. The problem of maximizing fuel utilization during a cycle may be formulated as a nonlinear mixed integer programming (NLMIP) problem, and has until now mostly been treated by heuristic optimization methods like simulated annealing. This paper evalutes the performance of state-of-the-art ...