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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.
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.