Highly Perturbed Operational Test Configurations at the WSMR Fast Burst Reactor

Abstract

The White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) MoLLY-G reactor has a long history of producing a well characterized environment for testing electronic systems/devices in fission environments. As an unmoderated, unreflected, bare critical assembly, it provides a slightly degraded fission spectrum with a 1/E tail. For radiation hardness testing of electronics, the neutron fluence is usually reported as the 1-MeV Equivalent Neutron Fluence for Silicon. In this paper, we examine additional neutron environments and characterizations ranging from low intensity neutron fields to more extreme modifications of our normal test environment.