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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.
V. H. Arakeri, I. Catton, and W. E. Kastenberg
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 66 | Number 2 | May 1978 | Pages 153-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27197
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten glass interacts explosively with water under certain contact mode conditions. The contact mode found explosive is as follows: Molten glass enters the water bath in the film boiling regime (as predicted by Dhir's correlation), and soon after entry the vapor film is perturbed sufficiently by an external pressure pulse. The ensuing reaction proceeds basically along the same lines as energetic tin/water interactions observed by several investigators. In the absence of this pressure pulse, the event is nonenergetic. The present findings are for a combination in which the hot material has a very low thermal diffusivity and the calculated interface temperature is significantly (∼180 K) below its melting temperature. This is similar to the characteristics of the UO2/sodium or UO2/water combinations. The observed explosive glass/water interactions show growth times on the order of a few milliseconds. The particulate size distribution from the present tests was coarser than the particulate size distribution from some in-pile and out-of-pile UO2/sodium interaction tests.