Reactor Definition and 356 Threads

Is specialization in radiation shielding and reactor/reactant materials a valid area of specialization? I am just worried if the two areas are too broad or different to name as my area of specialization. I ask this because I am trying to answer my applications for area of specialization and I...

hi, i am interested in nuclear physics but i don't really want to delve into the complexity of it, so could someone please give me an idea of the practical approach to making a breeder reactor, i do not intend to build one, i just would like to know how i would do it if did want to build one...

Hi A friend of mine is doing an assignment on alternative sources of energy when he came across this site and sent the link to me: http://www.crossfirefusor.com From reading a couple of pages it seems deceptively simple and I'm told that the guy expects to get a net gain of a couple MW of...

Hello, I'm working on a final paper for a HP class (ugrad/grad) and could use some suggestions. The problem I'm working on is determining the depth of water in a spent fuel pool, above a full core offload, required to reduce the exposure leve to X mGy/hr from fission products and principal...

Has anyone here ever heard of a TerraPower reactor or 'traveling wave reactor'? Bill Gates describes this in his TED lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JaF-fq2Zn7I&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param...

since fusion is not commericially feasible, does hybrid fusion fission reactor change that? http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v5/n6/full/nphys1288.html With the increasingly urgent need to find solutions to the impending energy crisis, there is growing interest within the fusion...

Traveling-Wave Reactor - we need them badly ! What is the fuel = Pu-239. Energy equivalent of 1 pound of the above = 2,000,000 lbs of coal Waste=comparatively miniscule Currently we have 104 nuclear reactors in operation in the US, which generate about 20% of our electricity. Waste...

Just trying to do a problem to find the minimum volume for a homogeneous, bare cylindrical reactor, and my main question is if the radial and axial bucklings are equal to one another at min. V or if there is some other condition that would be helpful. Thanks.

Hi there, I want to know about SCWR(supercritical water reactor) that is a Gen IV reactor. Has anybody introduce the technology of SCWR & SSCWR. thanks

Is a very low powered fission reactor (~25kWe) feasible for powering a large (car sized) Lunar or Martian rover? Or is it impractical (today) due to weight, size, radiation, or another technical reason? I understand that radioisotope thermoelectric generators are planned for future Mars...

You may have heard a lot of buzz in the news recently about the Traveling Wave Reactor, a concept being developed by TerraPower Inc, which uses depleted uranium (aka U238), instead of the usual rarified U235. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor Apparently, the...

Would it be possible to shrink down the scwr (super critical water reactor) to a modular size like the mpower reactor (such as the hyperion reactor)? Does anyone forsee any complications in this idea? It seems like the major change would be the use of super critical water. I know the SCWR is...

Hi all I am in mech engineering and I really want to study nuclear engineering to help push along the technology. My questions is given the US's slow adoption of new techs and plants is there really a great need for nuclear engineers specifically ones that work on the reactor. MY...

My professor told me that the neutrons in a reactor see the surface area of nuclei, and not the the projected cross section. That really doesn't make intuitive sense. Is he right?

Hi My school started a nuclear engineering concentration in the ME/CHE department for the spring and I just wanted to know what are the topics covered typically in a reactor course and what stuff should I brush up on to be sharp for the class? Thanks in advance.

19 reactor designs using 27 criteria, DOE concludes IFR to be the best reactor design to meet world's energy needs going forward. http://www.skirsch.com/politics/ifr/DOEnuclearstudy.pdf Do you agree?

How do nuclear reactors used to power satellites and such operate in zero gravity?

A fission reactor operates at 2700 MW level. Assume all this energy comes from the 200 MeV released by fission caused by thermal neutron absorption by 235U. At what daily rate is the mass of 235U used? (In practice, of course, the energy conversion is not 100% efficient, nor is all the 235U in a...

How high is the proliferation risk associated with reactor grade plutonium? I was under the impression that Pu-239 contaminated with too much Pu-240 and Pu-241 could not be practically used to produce nuclear weapons. I attended a nuclear issues talk which claimed that reactor grade fuel COULD...

I think its common knowledge that the next generation of nuclear reactors are going to operate at much higher temperatures than current designs in order to get away from the Rankin cycle and take advantage of thermochemical cycles, but what is it that makes high temperature reactors (HTR)...

Is it possible to use fisssion to create plasmas, then use the plasma to generate electricity instead of suing steam to for elctricity? Just a thought.

As I understand it, the magnetic field confines the electrons because of the repulsion of the electrons in the plasma and the electrons traveling in the magnetic current. My question is what keeps the protons and neutrons released in the plasma from passing through the magnetic field in a...

In principle, light-water reactor can also produce plutonium from uranium-238 as heavy-water reactor .Plutonium can be used to make nuclear-weapon! But,Why do we like to offer this kind of power plant to other nations?

Canada is currently the largest supplier of the world's radioactive medical isotopes. That is until AECL's aging NRU reactor at Chalk River sprang a leak and had to be shut down. AECL had built two reactors in the 1990's, Maple I and II, to produce medical isotopes but due to design problems...

B&W just announced a small 125MW(e) LWR using 5% enriched PWR fuel. Not certified yet. Still not very cheap (at least in the US) at $5000/kW, though with 1/10th the investment of the Westinghouse AP1000 designs perhaps more utilities will line up. The catch would be insuring that the red tape...

A reactor is producing nuclear energy at the rate of 30000KW.How many atoms of U-235 undergo fission per second?How many kg of U-235 would be used up in 1000 hr of operation.Assume an energy of 200 Mev is released per fission.(Avogadro number=6*10^26 atom/kg)

I am interested in lowering the cost of nuclear reactors through the use of novel reactor designs, particularly fast reactor designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (“IFR”) is a good starting point for a discussion since it was a real reactor with a long operating history. A few features of the...

Perhaps some semantics are involved here, Wikipedia and some others describe nuclear reactor material as going through a slow "fission" process. I have always thougt of it more as "natural decay". I visualize fission in a weapon, as the "breaking" of the atom, which creates new atoms and...

I am currently a junior (senior in a week haha) in Electrical Engineering, concentrating in Power/Control Systems. I took an introductory course in Nuclear Engineering and have become very interested in reactor design/system design (BWR/PWR/Submarine reactors/entire systems not just the...

I've been trying to get more understanding of bypass flow in a reactor, especially the "hot bypass flow" and how it affects the core state, and its origin. Does anyone know any relevant literature to read or can give an explanation to this. Thanks.

My physics teacher today said in a nuclear reactor there is radiation called like sarencobe radiation I didn't hear him very well so I don’t know how to spell it , he said it is this erie glow in the water when the neutrons out run the light in the water , can anyone tell me how to...

Several times now, I've been in contact with people who talked about the "travelling wave reactor", but I can't find any "official" information about it. The only thing I could find that sounded somewhat serious is in MIT's "Technology Review": http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22114/...

Folks, this is my first thread in this forum. I'm writing my PhD about HTR-Fuel Elements. I'm not quite sure if anyone in this forum knows about this sort of fuel which is totally different to "normal" fuel. Anyway, I'm looking for informations about research in the US (or global) what...

Hello everybody, This problem is from "Elementary Introduction to Nuclear Reactor Physics" by Liverhant, I will be thankful for any help,because I'm really stuck on it :( ------------------------ (6-11)Calculate the smallest value of A for which the maximum fractional energy loss can be...

I've run into a some advocates (assorted nuclear engineers and grad students it seems) for an unusual nuclear reactor design. It is a thermal-spectrum thorium breeder reactor. The fuel is liquid - it is a molten salt, containing the fluorides of both U-233 fuel and thorium, as well as lithium...

Gas core reactor rockets use nuclear gas reacting to super heat and therefore pressurize hydrogen. They operate at about 25000 C. Why not use a high intensity plasma arc which routinely operate at about 13,000 C but if designed to can go much higher by at least several fold. I got bored...

Homework Statement How many kilograms of U-235 would be needed to run a 707 MW reactor for 1 year? Homework Equations 183.9 MeV released per reaction 7.57E26 reactions per year (These numbers are from the prior problems) The Attempt at a Solution I thought maybe half life, but...

Homework Statement a particular nuclear power reactor operates at 1000MWe (megawatts electric) with an overall efficiency in converting fission energy to electrical energy of 30%. what mass of 235 U must fission in order for the power plant to operate for (a)one day, (b)one year?(c) if the...

I am trying to figure out why the design problem with the Maple1 and Maple 2 reactors cannot be fixed. This http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080516.wnuclear17/BNStory/National explains the decision to end the projects. These reactors have been built. During commissioning...

I had a homework question I am really stuck on- How do you calculate neuron flux

Hello Chaps, I have been thinking about for a bit and the texts i have are quite vague on the topic. I'd like to know what monitoring devices are used for the control rods. I would have to assume that power output or neutron detection is used for this purpose? Cheers, Rhys

Homework Statement Consider the following two well-mixed, isothermal batch reactors for the elementary and irreversible decomposition of A to B, A\stackrel{k}{\rightarrow}2B reactor1: The reactor volume is constant (Pressure is variable) reactor2: The reactor pressure is constant (Volume is...

i was watching this show on the Science Channel and in it they talked about a new type of fusion reactor that is currently being built(construction started like 30 years ago). They said it will produce energy for entire world the same way the sun produces energy (fusing hydrogen). It's suppose...

In this problem, we're going get a rough estimate the amount of uranium fuel it would take if the US received all its electrical power from nuclear power plants. The size of a power plant in normally given as the about of electrical power it can produce when running a full capacity. This...

Hi folks, can anyone suggest a good and current reference text on nuclear reactor theory and physics? I'm a theorist, so mathematically sophisticated presentation is welcome. Thanks in advance for any recommendations.

Hey, The question is. Are they ever going to open more Nuclear Engineering reactor colleges? I know in the WHOLE state of PA, there are "1" college and it's Penn State main campus. 0 are in NJ. 1 in NY but I think not sure might close out the reactor in NY. The college is Cornell in upstate...

well, that's the heading of a project i am doing...i need some help on neutron detectors... how they are dectected and what is the probable graph of count rate vs, pulse height that i might get for a nuclar fission reaction of U-235... can anyone help?

There's an article in the May 12 2008 New Yorker Magazine by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he talks about brainstorming sessions by teams of inventors headed by Nathan Myhrvold. One of the ideas is a small Nuclear Reactor with no moving parts. Supposedly the core would be about 3x10 meters...

Assuming a Light Water Reactor, what would be the decay energy of the fission products of the reactor's nuclear waste and it's thermal yield? What I am getting at is that instead of just storing the waste, i want to know how much electricity the waste emits. I have very little information...

Assuming a Light Water Reactor, what would be the decay energy of the fission products taken out of a reactor (the reactor's nuclear waste) and it's thermal yield? What I am getting at is, there is all this talk of safe storage of nuclear waste...but that nuclear waste is still emitting...