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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Juan J. Manzano-Ruiz, David Gordon Wilson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 88 | Number 3 | November 1984 | Pages 275-286
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-A18582
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A test rig was built to run steady-state experiments with air/water mixtures at low pressure (42 kPa), and to determine the performance characteristics of two-phase flow through a centrifugal pump. Application is to a loss-of-coolant accident situation in nuclear reactor power plants if a large break in one of the primary pump legs took place. Two feasible accident conditions were tested; first- (forward flow and rotation) and third-quadrant (reverse flow and rotation) conditions. A significant head-pump degradation process was observed in the first-quadrant operation for increasing amounts of gas supplied, whereas in the third quadrant no difference in performance was detected with respect to single-phase flow and up to an inlet volumetric quality of 20%. The data gathered have been correlated in terms of a defined head-loss ratio, flow coefficient, and volumetric quality, which facilitates its use in predicting pump performance in similar designs of different scale.