A Numerical Study of Stiffness in Point Reactor Kinetics

A stiffness in a dynamical system is numerically studied to investigate a sensitivity of a reactor to the delayed neutron spectra with the Doppler feedback. To test numerical procedure, we adopted a case of a reactivity accident in a point reactor model. We found that the stiffness is sensitive to a reactivity insertion rate and the delayed neutron spectra in the Doppler feedback phase. Our numerical results show that global reactor characteristics are not very sensitive to the delayed neutron spectra even though their instantaneous ones are sensitive. We present the time evolution of each precursor group explicitly.