Neutronic Design and Analysis of a Small Nuclear Reactor to Supply District Heating and Electrical Energy to Canadian Forces Bases Located in the Arctic or the Northern Remote Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present work describes the preliminary design of a 25-MW(thermal) nuclear reactor capable of providing safe and reliable heating and electricity to any Canadian Forces Bases, especially in the Arctic, as well as in comparable civilian applications. The aim of the project is to provide a nuclear reactor system with sufficient inherent safety characteristics as it is intended to run in automatic mode and be monitored by operators with limited experience and training. For the neutronics calculations, the design work of the reactor’s core is carried out using the probabilistic simulation code MCNP 5 along with the Winfrith Improved Multigroup Scheme–Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (WIMS-AECL) deterministic code, Version 3.1, thus permitting a code-to-code comparison of the numerical results. Several design constraints related to coolant temperature and pressure, reactivity control, fuel enrichment, and time between refueling have been considered. The final reactor concept, named the Super Near Boiling 25 reactor (SNB25), provides heat energy dedicated to building and domestic water heating and supplies electricity through an organic Rankine cycle energy conversion plant. SNB25 employs TRISO fuel particles, contained in zirconium-sheathed fuel rods, and is light water cooled and moderated. Complete reactivity control is achieved through simple and reliable mechanical means consisting of 133 control rods and six adjustable radial reflector plates. The optimized reactor core configuration, along with its intrinsic control system, allows for the power plant to operate safely for more than a decade between refuelings from a typical central heating plant or the basement of a multilevel office building. The work also included a preliminary investigation of the nonnuclear part of the energy supply system including heat exchangers and the turbine-driven, electricity-generating system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".