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Breaking ground on a new approach to construction
The drive to Kairos Power’s reactor demonstration site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is not only scenic—it’s historic. Nearly 85 years ago, roughly 30,000 construction workers transformed orchards and farmland into a key Manhattan Project site. Depending on your route, you may pass by one of the three gatehouses that were once military checkpoints controlling access to Atomic Energy Commission production facilities.
J. E. Brockmann, W. W. Tarbell
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 88 | Number 3 | November 1984 | Pages 342-356
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pressurized ejection of melt from a reactor pressure vessel has been identified as an important element of a severe reactor accident. Copious aerosol production is observed when thermitically generated melts pressurized with nitrogen or carbon dioxide to 1.3 to 17 MPa are ejected into an air atmosphere. Aerosol particle size distributions measured in the tests have modes of ∼0.5, 5, and >10 µm. Mechanisms leading to formation of these multimodal size distributions are suggested. This aerosol is a potentially important fission product source term that has not been considered in previous severe accident analyses.