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determined by radiant energy transfer are then included in the calculation of the critical uranium mass. The emphasis is on the development and application of general methods of analysis, rather than a conceptual design of an entire plasma reactor system. In order that methods of this study may be extended to actual design problems, numerical techniques are developed for several o2 these methods.

        The effects of the high fuel and coolant temperatures on neutron reactions are treated in Chapters II and III, within the framework of the diffusion approximation to the Boltzmann equation. The composition of the uranium plasma region and the hydrogen plasma region, and the influence of plasma effects on reactor criticality are analyzed in Chapters IV and V. The composition of the hydrogen-uranium mixing region is analyzed in Chapter VI. In Chapter VII an analytic simulation of hydrogenland uranium mixing is developed. In Chapter VIII the calculated plasma compositions and the simulated flow distributions are used to determine the temperature distributions resulting from radiant energy transfer. The temperature distributions are then related to the critical uranium mass. Recommended theoretical and experimental extensions of this study are presented in Chapter IX.