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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
Roberto Baratti, Anna Maria Polcaro, Pier Francesco Ricci, Antonio Viola, Giancarlo Pierini
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 2 | September 1986 | Pages 266-274
Technical Paper | Tritium System | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24978
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical model has been developed to determine the amount of tritium that permeates the cooling circuit of a tritium breeding blanket containing the liquid eutectic alloy 17Li-83Pb. This model, which has been applied to phase 2A of the International Tokamak Reactor/Next European Torus project, is used to predict the effect of the operating conditions of the blanket, as well as those of a spray tower employed as a tritium recovery unit, and the kinetic parameters for the permeation and desorption processes. The results of this theoretical study indicate that the amount of permeated tritium proved to be not very different for the maximum [10.82 kPa1/2 · m3(mol · T)−1] and minimum [0.7 kPa1/2 · m3(mol · T)−1] values of Sievert's constant (Ks) existing in literature. This amount, moreover, can be reduced to 0.1 to 0.01 g/day of tritium by the presence of small oxide barriers (a permeation reduction factor of α ≅ 100) on the cooling tubes and by the easy operating conditions of the spray tower, which include a droplet diameter of 0.5 mm; a tritium pressure of 0.13 kPa at 673 K; and a residence time of 0.5 s.