Planned Destruction of Metal-Core Reactor: Simulation of Catastrophic Accidents and New Experimental Possibilities

Abstract

A reactor with a destructible core (RIR reactor) generating a pulse with an output of ~1.5 × 10¹⁹ fissions and a full width at half maximum of ~2.5 μs was developed and tested at VNIIEF. In the course of investigation, a computational-experimental method for laboratory calibration of the reactor was created and worked out. This method ensures a high accuracy of predicting the energy release in a real experiment with excess reactivity of ~3β_eff above prompt criticality. A transportable explosion-proof chamber was also developed, which ensures the safe localization of explosion products of the core of small-sized nuclear devices and charges of high explosives with equivalent mass of up to 100 kg of TNT.