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MARVEL team shares lessons learned through microreactor development
On June 1 at the American Nuclear Society’s Annual Conference in Denver, Colo., a team from Idaho National Laboratory presented a session titled “Lessons Learned from MARVEL Reactor Fabrication.” The presentation highlighted challenges that arose as they moved from design to manufacturing and assembly, with a focus on reactor part fabrication, Stirling engine implementation, and reactivity control system development.
Steven A. Wright, Erhard A. Fischer, Peter K. Mast, Gustav Schumacher
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 326-340
Technical Paper | Analyse | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During an unprotected loss-of-flow accident in a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor, the mode of fuel disruption in sodium-voided channels and the subsequent fuel and clad motion are important issues that determine the further accident sequence. To study these phenomena, a series of in-pile fuel disruption experiments, FD2/4, were performed, and the fuel behavior was recorded by high-speed cinematography. Power transients typical of a heterogeneous (e.g., Clinch River Breeder Reactor) and a homogeneous (e.g., SNR-300, Federal Republic of Germany) core design were employed. In the first case, large-scale liquid swelling was observed, whereas in the second case, disruption by solid-state breakup occurred. Both observations provided direct experimental confirmation of the assumption usually made in the accident analysis, and thus removed still existing modeling uncertainties concerning the disruption behavior.