EXPONENTIAL EXPERIMENTS WITH HEAVY-WATER, GRAPHITE-AND-DIPHENYL MODERATED, URANIUM METAL LATTICES

摘要

Primarily to provide a basis for the development of calcula-tional procedures and to aid in understanding reactors in general, Atomics International has carried out a series of experiments during the past several years to study the basic reactor physics of several clean lattices and their constituents. Three moderators, heavy water, graphite, and diphenyl were used, in turn, in these lattices. Three metal fuels (but not mixtures thereof) were used. The fuel enrichments (at. %) were 0.4962 (depleted), 0. 7Z05 (natural) and 0. 9124 (enriched). The fuel elements made from 4-inch long slugs, were in the form of a cylinder which had a diameter of one inch. These elements were 5 ft. long. This report summarizes these experiments (most of the results have been reported separately) and presents a simplified two group theoretical comparison of the results. It is demonstrated that this model is not accurate for the description of these lattices. A more elegant treatment •was beyond the scope of this work.