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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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No impact from Savannah River radioactive wasps
The news is abuzz with recent news stories about four radioactive wasp nests found at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The site has been undergoing cleanup operations since the 1990s related to the production of plutonium and tritium for defense purposes during the Cold War. Cleanup activities are expected to continue into the 2060s.
K. Chen, C. A. Erdman, M. F. Kennedy, A. B. Reynolds
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 83 | Number 4 | April 1983 | Pages 459-472
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE83-A18649
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A homogeneous nucleation-condensation growth model was developed for calculating particle-size distributions measured in capacitor discharge vaporization (CDV) experiments conducted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Uranium dioxide pellets were partially vaporized in an argon environment by rapid energy deposition through capacitor discharge. This was followed by rapid expansion and subsequent condensation of the UO2 vapor. Measured primary particle-size distributions of the resulting aerosols were lognormal, with a geometric mean particle diameter of (0.014 ± 0.002) µm and a geometric standard deviation of 1.7 ± 0.1. It was postulated that the expanding UO2 vapor compressed the surrounding argon as in a spherical shock tube and that the aerosol was generated by homogeneous nucleation and condensation growth in the resulting rarefaction wave. The calculated motion of the U02-argon interface is in approximate agreement with the movies of the expansion process. The calculated particle-size distributions are in agreement with the measured distributions except at the large particle end. This agreement indicates that the small primary particles from the CDV tests resulted from homogeneous nucleation and condensation growth, as assumed in the analytical model.