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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
S. M. Zivi, M. Epstein, R. W. Wright, J. J. Barghusen, D. H. Cho, F. J. Testa, G. T. Goldfuss, R. W. Mouring
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 56 | Number 3 | March 1975 | Pages 229-240
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE75-A26737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two in-pile transient experiments were performed in the TREAT Reactor Facility to investigate fuel-coolant interaction phenomena that might occur in a hypothetical prompt-burst disassembly accident involving extensive fuel vaporization in a nearly unvoided liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core. In these tests, a single fuel pin containing 28 g of UO2 was subjected to a self-limited 23-msec-period TREAT power excursion which deposited fission energy of 1700 cal/g of UO2 in the fuel. The pin was contained in an instrumented autoclave filled with stagnant sodium. Failure of the fuel pins occurred at a mean energy input of about 540 cal/g, corresponding to a UO2 vapor pressure of about 100 atm. Results of these tests indicated that no energetic fuel-coolant interaction was produced and that the measured transient pressures can be reasonably described by the time history of the fuel vapor pressure.