OK, I think I have come up with a good cobalt-60 reactor design. It takes a 1x reactor in the middle loaded with a moderator rod, surrounded by 4 2x2 reactors, and 4 more 1x reactors with moderator rods to fill in the corners. You load 8 cobalt-60 fuel rods in the inner ring surrounding the central moderator. Each fuel rod touches the central moderator, giving it an 8x reflection, and also touches one of the corner moderators, which only have 2x. That gives each rod a total of 10x reflected neutrons, plus 1x from its neighbor. Throw a reflector rod in the outer ring and you get a total of 12x neutrons. In industrial coolant, you get 8 emission with a 1/32 factor. If I’m doing the math right, that ramps up to 12.8 actual emission, x12 for 153.6, plus the 8 self neutrons for a total of 161.6 neutrons per rod, or 1,292.8 total. That’s almost enough heat to run 7 MV dynamos driven by steel turbines and 3x strong invar boilers each producing 88 EU/t, or a total of 592 EU/t.
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