AN MCNP PARAMETRIC STUDY OF GEORGE C. LAURENCE'S SUBCRITICAL PILE EXPERIMENT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early 1940s at the National Research Council (NRC) Laboratories in Ottawa, Canada, Dr. George Laurence conducted several experiments to determine if a sustained nuclear fission chain reaction in a carbon–uranium arrangement (or “pile”) was possible. Although Dr. Laurence did not achieve criticality, these pioneering experiments marked a significant historical event in nuclear science, and they provided a valuable reference for subsequent experiments that led to the design of Canada’s first heavy-water reactors at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. This paper summarizes the results of a recent collaborative project between Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and the Deep River Science Academy undertaken to numerically explore the experiments carried out at the NRC Laboratories by Dr. Laurence, while teaching high school students about nuclear science and technology. In this study, a modern Monte Carlo reactor physics code, MCNP6, was utilized to identify and study the key parameters impacting the subcritical pile’s neutron multiplication factor (e.g., moderation, geometry, material impurities) and quantify their effect on the extent of subcriticality. The findings presented constitute the first endeavour to model, using a current computational reactor physics tool, the seminal experiment that provided the foundation of Canada’s nuclear science and technology program.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".