The current regulations for nuclear power plants focus on light water reactors (LWRs), and as such they may not be properly applied to non-LWR reactors such as Generation IV Reactors. For instance, there is no plant state comparable to core damage in pebble bed reactors [1]. As a result, the surrogate safety goal based on core-damage frequency (CDF), as being applied to LWRs in many countries d...

This study (1) investigates the neutronic characteristics of the Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor (PB-AHTR); (2) compares the PB-AHTR neutronic performance against those of the alternative design options of He-cooled high temperature reactors using either pebble (PBMR) or prismatic (VHTR) fuel and against a liquid-salt cooled design version of the latter (LS-VHTR); (3) studies the p...

A sorption-enhanced water-gas shift (SEWGS) system providing CO2-free synthesis gas (CO + H2) for jet fuel production from pure CO was studied. The (WGS) reaction catalyzed by a commercial Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst and carried out with in-situ CO2 removal on 20 wt% potassium-promoted hydrotalcite-derived sorbent. Catalyst activity investigated in fixed bed tubular reactor. Different sorbent materia...

.......................................................................................................................................... 2 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 5 1.1 History of Domestic Commercial Reactor Development and Licensing ......................... 5 1.1.1 ...

The application of an airborne electronically steered thinned array L-band radiometer (ESTAR) for soil moisture mapping was investigated over the semiarid rangeland Walnut Gulch Watershed located In southeastern Arizona. During the experiment, antecedent rainfall and evaporation were very dif ferent and resulted in a wide range of soil moisture conditions. The high spatial variability of rainfa...

In this thesis we develop a new iterative homogenization technique for pebble bed reactors, based on a "macro-stochastic" transport approximation in the collision probability method. A model has been developed to deal with the stochastic distribution of pebbles with different burnup in the core, considering spectral differences in homogenization and depletion calculations. This is generally not...