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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
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.
M. D. Oh, M. L. Corradini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 95 | Number 3 | March 1987 | Pages 225-240
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE87-A20452
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A one-dimensional, propagation/expansion model has been developed for large scale vapor explosions based on a fragmentation concept involving film collapse and coolant jet impingement and entrapment. This fragmentation model was combined with the nonequilibrium propagation/explosion model to predict the integral behavior in a vapor explosion such as pressure history and explosion conversion ratio. The model predicts the correct qualitative trends from available explosion data (e.g., the fully instrumented test series at Sandia National Laboratories) as a function of fuel composition, coolant temperature, ambient pressure, coolant/fuel mass ratio, and initial constraint. Quantitative agreement with data is found to be quite dependent on the initial mixing conditions, i.e., coolant vapor and liquid volume fractions in the explosion zone. Some of the predicted trends would change when the scale increases.