A New Safety Principle For The Slowpoke Reactor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SLOWPOKE-2 (LEU core) is a pool-type nuclear reactor with a maximum nominal thermal power of 20 kW. It uses a pelletized uranium oxide fuel (19.9% enrichment) and provides a useful high neutron flux in the order of 1012 n.cm2s-1. The key safety features built into the reactor design are the strictly limited amount of excess reactivity and the negative reactivity feedback characteristics, which provide a demonstrably safe self-limiting power excursion response to large reactivity insertions. However, the limited amount of excess reactivity also limits continuous prolonged reactor operation at full power. With a 4 mk excess reactivity, the reactor can operate for about one day at full power, 20 kW, before criticality is lost due to temperature effects and xenon poisoning. A new safety concept is proposed in this paper that enables the continuous operation to a few months by increasing the excess reactivity from 4 mk to 8 mk. A Matlab/simulink model of SLOWPOKE-2 has demonstrated that core operation life can be extended to several months without adding a beryllium shim.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".