Nuclear Reactor Design: For Young Inventors

Most people never get to design a nuclear reactor. This book hands you the controls. Online simulation: https://nuclear-ten.vercel.app/ A College-Level Manual of Reactor Physics, Thermal-Hydraulics, and Core Design

Choose a fissile fuel. Choose a moderator, a coolant, and a core shape. Set five operating parameters. The program solves for the moderator-to-fuel ratio that makes your reactor exactly critical, then reports critical mass, thermal power, power density, heat flux, fuel centreline temperature, coolant velocity, neutron flux, and cycle efficiency, recomputed the instant you move a slider.

BUILT FOR SELF-STUDY OR THE CLASSROOM Five suggested exercises to run yourself FOUR WORKED EXAMPLES, START TO FINISH A pressurised water reactor , beginning from a design that looks perfectly healthy and is in fact thermally impossible, then repairing it using nothing but numbers the program reports. A heavy-water reactor , and why D2O buys natural-uranium operation at the price of size. A high-temperature gas reactor , where graphite delivers the best neutron economy in the book and helium presents a punishing circulator bill. An open-loop propulsion core that goes critical on 2.7 kilograms of fuel and then melts itself. Fixing it is the exercise. Because a case costs nothing to run, you can sweep a variable across its entire range and watch what happens. That is how engineering intuition is actually built.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN Part I, the physics. Fission and the neutron life cycle. Prompt and delayed neutrons, and why reactor control depends entirely on the delayed ones. Moderation, the Fermi age, and the diffusion length. Geometric buckling, critical size, and why the sphere always wins. Part II, the engineering. Porosity and the coolant unit cell. Power density, heat flux, and departure from nucleate boiling. Fuel centreline temperature and the melting limit. Pressure drop, pumping power, and the Mach limit on gas coolants. Closed-loop and open-loop power conversion. Part III, the program. A step-by-step guide to every control, every output page, and every way a design can fail. FOUR WORKED EXAMPLES, START TO FINISH A pressurised water reactor , beginning from a design that looks perfectly healthy and is in fact thermally impossible, then repairing it using nothing but numbers the program reports. A heavy-water reactor , and why D2O buys natural-uranium operation at the price of size. A high-temperature gas reactor , where graphite delivers the best neutron economy in the book and helium presents a punishing circulator bill. An open-loop propulsion core that goes critical on 2.7 kilograms of fuel and then melts itself. Fixing it is the exercise. BUILT FOR SELF-STUDY AND FOR THE CLASSROOM Nine figures, seventeen data tables, and a complete equation summary A 48-term glossary and eighteen references to the standard literature Six appendices: fuel, moderator and coolant data; stated assumptions and limitations; and two operating plants to benchmark your designs against Five suggested exercises to run yourself For undergraduate engineering and physics students, for instructors who want a hands-on laboratory that needs no laboratory, and for any technically literate reader who wants to understand what genuinely constrains a nuclear reactor design.