Thank you, Dr. Eagle, for sharing with all of us your knowledge and understanding and taking the time to put together these videos. I've been going through the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power School and it has because of your videos, I have been able to succeed in the program.
Uh oh, your math is not correct at 27:25. The log of the product is the sum of the logs rather than the product of the logs. But b/c you do the inverse error when applying the exponential (exp(a.b)=exp(a)+exp(b) and not exp(a).exp(b)) the end result is OK. Sorry, but needed to point it out b/c it was confusing to me at 1st. Anyway, thanks for this great series.
What is missing in the 4-term equation is Xenon poisoning, or neutron absorption by Xenon which is a fission product. Not taking that into consideration was one reason why Tschernobyl happened.
It does. The term “f” is often referred as fuel utilization. It is defined as the ratio of neutrons absorbed by the fuel (Uranium) to the number neutrons absorbed by the fuel AND non-fuel (anything that does not fission). The non fuel can be water or xenon. As the production of xenon increases f decreases therefore k decreases. This WAS taken into account at Chernobyl. To increase k due to the xenon buildup the control rods were removed completely which was greatly contributed to the accident.
Has anyone tried combining a fission reactor and a fusion reactor? I mean using the fusion reactor as a source of neutrons to drive a fission reactor at subcritical mass.
There's 17 ways this Equation can be Improved, however its Obvious that this is Hidden so that the Viewers can not actually Construct a Weapon, so this is just Basic Mathematical Fun.
So all the variables in: K, T, t, delayed neutrons, and Qheat need to be experimentally determined before you can even attempt at trying any of this? At what point was anyone confident it would not explode? Is there a small enough mass required to do it on a small scale basis in order to avoid a large catastrophe? Or are large scale reactors the only safe way of continuously having fission reactions?
That nuclear reactor seems like playing with fire. With that time constants, and a system so unstable... it's like making a generator from a dynamite bundle. I know there is alternatives like the thorium based. Could be nice to know the physics behing a self stabilized fission nuclear reactor.
In the simple reactor described here there would not be an (atomic) explosion if there were no moderation. It's very difficult to technically) make an atomic bomb. and one needs highly enriched U235.
Water moderated reactors have a negative void coefficient which in layman terms means that if the moderating water happens to boil into steam, the moderating effect of the water is lost and this will immediately halt the nuclear chain reactions because the neutrons will be too fast to trigger fissions in the uranium fuel.
Brilliant talk. @27:25 should be. ln [ n(0) (1+d)^(t/T) ] == ln n(0) + t/T ln (1+d) ~= ln n(0) + td/T exp ( ln n(0) + td/T ) = exp ln n(0) * exp td/T == n(0)exp(td/T) It doesn't change the result but I thought I should share since the captions don't seem to work for me.
That's a complicated kettle. Can one use the water to make a cup of tea? No. Then what good is it? K1 Boom! Understanding how something happens is not necessarily advocacy. No explanation of waste products or how to decommission your ideal lead lined concrete box.
