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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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Disney World should have gone nuclear
There is extra significance to the American Nuclear Society holding its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, this past week. That’s because in 1967, the state of Florida passed a law allowing Disney World to build a nuclear power plant.
Emilian Popov, Kaushik Banerjee (ORNL)
Proceedings | International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management 2019 (IHLRWM 2019) | Knoxville, TN, April 14-18, 2019 | Pages 33-38
This paper describes the fissile mass and concentration necessary for a critical event to occur outside containers disposed in a bedded salt repository. The criticality limits are based on modeling mixtures of water, salt, dolomite, concrete, rust, and fissile material using a neutron/photon transport computational code. Several idealized depositional configurations of fissile material in the host rock are analyzed: homogeneous spheres and heterogeneous arrangements of plate fractures in regular arrays. Deposition of large masses and concentrations are required for criticality to occur for low enriched 235U enrichment. Homogeneous mixtures with deposition in all the porosity are more reactive at high enrichments of 235U and 239Pu. However, unlike typical engineered systems, heterogeneous configurations can be more reactive than homogeneous systems at high enrichment when deposition occurs in only a portion of the porosity and the total porosity is small, because the relationship between the porosity of the fractures and matrix also strongly influences the results.