2011/12/1 Joshua Cude <joshua.c...@gmail.com>: > Putting in a gamma source is easy. Putting one in that could account for the > 10 kW of power? Not so easy. This would correspond to megacuries, or at > least hundreds of kCi. That's 1000 times more radioactive than the sources > in devices used for radiotherapy, and unshielded, they are extremely > dangerous.
Curies don't mean much by themselves. Your figure is assuming 6.5 MeV gammas. Do we know the spectrum of the gammas inside the reactor? There was some talk of 500 keV gammas. In that case you get 10e3 [J/s] / ( 1.6e-19 [eV/J] x 500e3 [eV/photon] ) = 1.25e17 [photon/s] This is 1.25e17 [photon/s] / 3.7e10 [photon/s/curie] = 3.4e6 [curie] Assuming an area of 25 cm^2, that's a flux of 5e19 photon/m2/s. Then 2.5 cm of lead is approximately necessary and sufficient to shield that flux to less than 1 photon/m2/s. -- Berke Durak
