Lecture

Nuclear Reactor Physics

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In course

ME-464: Introduction to nuclear engineering

This course is intended to understand the engineering design of nuclear power plants using the basic principles of reactor physics, fluid flow and heat transfer. This course includes the following: Reactor designs, Thermal analysis of nuclear fuel, Nuclear ...

Description

This lecture covers various exercises related to nuclear reactor physics, including calculating the mass of fissioned uranium, heat evacuation rates, radioactive equilibrium, and critical reactor parameters. Students will solve problems on mass flow rates, radioactive decay chains, and reactor core compositions, gaining insights into thermal power, reactivity, and heat transfer in nuclear reactors.

Instructors (3)

Andreas Pautz

Teaching & PhD PhD Students Sofia Portolan, Michel Saliba, Bishal Torrente, Alexis Paul Boris Claude Dupont-Bembinoff, Cynthia Camila Güttlein Past EPFL PhD Students Ting Zhu, Vladimir Vladimirov Brankov, Boris Aviv Hombourger, Damar Canggih Wicaksono, Petra Mala, Adolfo Rais, Valentyn Bykov, Daniel Jerôme Siefman, Evgeny Nikitin, Dionysios Chionis, Oskari Ville Pakari, Friederike Bostelmann, Jiani Gao, Efstathios Vlassopoulos, Alessandro Scolaro, Stefan Radman, Alexander Aures, Lubomír Bures, Ahmed Salah

Alessandro Scolaro

Carlo Fiorina

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Energy engineering

Nuclear power: Topics in nuclear power

Related concepts (32)

Nuclear reactor

A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nuclear fission is passed to a working fluid (water or gas), which in turn runs through steam turbines. These either drive a ship's propellers or turn electrical generators' shafts. Nuclear generated steam in principle can be used for industrial process heat or for district heating.

Nuclear reactor physics

Nuclear reactor physics is the field of physics that studies and deals with the applied study and engineering applications of chain reaction to induce a controlled rate of fission in a nuclear reactor for the production of energy. Most nuclear reactors use a chain reaction to induce a controlled rate of nuclear fission in fissile material, releasing both energy and free neutrons.

Nuclear fission

Nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay. Nuclear fission was discovered on 19 December 1938 in Berlin by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. Physicists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch explained it theoretically in January 1939. Frisch named the process "fission" by analogy with biological fission of living cells.

Light-water reactor

The light-water reactor (LWR) is a type of thermal-neutron reactor that uses normal water, as opposed to heavy water, as both its coolant and neutron moderator; furthermore a solid form of fissile elements is used as fuel. Thermal-neutron reactors are the most common type of nuclear reactor, and light-water reactors are the most common type of thermal-neutron reactor. There are three varieties of light-water reactors: the pressurized water reactor (PWR), the boiling water reactor (BWR), and (most designs of) the supercritical water reactor (SCWR).

Natural nuclear fission reactor

A natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions occur. The conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could exist had been predicted in 1956 by Paul Kuroda. The remnants of an extinct or fossil nuclear fission reactor, where self-sustaining nuclear reactions have occurred in the past, can be verified by analysis of isotope ratios of uranium and of the fission products (and the stable daughter nuclides of those fission products).

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