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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.
F. Behafarid, D. Shaver, I. A. Bolotnov, S. P. Antal, K. E. Jansen, M. Z. Podowski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 44-55
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 14th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-14) / Reactor Safety; Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15755
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The objective of this paper is to give an overview of a multiscale modeling approach to three-dimensional (3-D) two-phase transient computer simulations of the injection of a jet of gaseous fission products into a partially blocked sodium fast reactor (SFR) coolant channel following localized cladding overheat and breach. The phenomena governing accident progression have been resolved at two different spatial and temporal scales by the intercommunicating computational multiphase fluid dynamics codes PHASTA (at direct numerical simulation level) and NPHASE-CMFD (at Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes level). The issues discussed in the paper include an overview of the proposed 3-D two-phase-flow models of the interrelated phenomena that occur as a result of cladding failure and the subsequent injection of a jet of gaseous fission products into partially blocked SFR coolant channels and gas-molten-sodium transport along the channels. An analysis is presented on the consistency and accuracy of the models used in the simulations, and the results are shown of the predictions of gas discharge and gas-liquid-metal two-phase flow in a multichannel fuel assembly. Also, a discussion is given of the major novel aspects of the overall work.