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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
Douglas W. Stamps
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 128 | Number 3 | March 1998 | Pages 243-269
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE98-A1954
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CONTAIN code was used to predict the helium concentrations, gas temperatures and pressures, and wall temperatures of four experiments performed in the NUPEC 1/4-scale model containment. These experiments investigated the thermal-hydraulic effects of helium and steam source flow rates, source elevation, and internal water sprays. Two CONTAIN flow solvers and two nodalization schemes were assessed. One NUPEC test, International Standard Problem 35, was investigated in detail, including the pretest heating phase. The thermal hydraulics of this test were dominated by internal water sprays. A modeling approach based on the assumption that the water sprays generated a large air vortex yielded the best results. Reasons for deviations between the predictions and data are suggested based on experimental uncertainties, different analysis methods, and nodalization schemes.