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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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High temperature fission chambers engineered for AMR/SMR safety and performance
As the global energy landscape shifts towards safer, smaller, and more flexible nuclear power, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Gen. IV* technologies are at the forefront of innovation. These advanced designs pose new challenges in size, efficiency, and operating environment that traditional instrumentation and control solutions aren’t always designed to handle.
P. Goldschmidt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 49 | Number 3 | November 1972 | Pages 263-273
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22541
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle and Robbins’ Criterion allow us to find, in the general case of intermediate reactors, the distribution of fuel enrichment that minimizes the critical mass of a reactor of given power and subject to constraints on the maximum power density and on the enrichment. The two group diffusion model is used in slab geometry. The optimal sequence of control (enrichment) zones is made up of a central constant power density zone, a zone of maximum enrichment, a zone of variable enrichment (where the control is singular) and finally an external zone of minimum enrichment (or a reflector). In the particular case of fast reactors the optimal solution does not include the singular control zone.