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Building a Reactor
A nuclear reactor is just a system that can get heavy elements to break apart in an efficient manner. The reactor itself, the nuclear core, is not a complicated mechanical contraption. The core has no moving parts or complex mechanisms. It's just an arrangement of special materials, that permits nuclear
We will try to get neutrons to multiply like bacteria, and carefully control the growth or decline in the population to sustain a desired number of fission reactions per unit time. The research and development required to understand materials for use in the complex nuclear environment is often a decades long endeavor with limited success. To account for all this, we have to make the starting configuration sufficiently super-critical that it can tolerate an increasing number of fission products that poison the neutron environment.
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