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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.
Antti Daavittila, Anitta Hämäläinen, Riitta Kyrki-Rajamäki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 2 | May 2003 | Pages 116-123
Technical Paper | OECD/NRC MSLB Benchmark | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3377
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
All of the three exercises of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Nuclear Regulatory Commission pressurized water reactor main steam line break (PWR MSLB) benchmark were calculated at VTT, the Technical Research Centre of Finland. For the first exercise, the plant simulation with point-kinetic neutronics, the thermal-hydraulics code SMABRE was used. The second exercise was calculated with the three-dimensional reactor dynamics code TRAB-3D, and the third exercise with the combination TRAB-3D/SMABRE. VTT has over ten years' experience of coupling neutronic and thermal-hydraulic codes, but this benchmark was the first time these two codes, both developed at VTT, were coupled together. The coupled code system is fast and efficient; the total computation time of the 100-s transient in the third exercise was 16 min on a modern UNIX workstation. The results of all the exercises are similar to those of the other participants. In order to demonstrate the effect of secondary circuit modeling on the results, three different cases were calculated. In case 1 there is no phase separation in the steam lines and no flow reversal in the aspirator. In case 2 the flow reversal in the aspirator is allowed, but there is no phase separation in the steam lines. Finally, in case 3 the drift-flux model is used for the phase separation in the steam lines, but the aspirator flow reversal is not allowed. With these two modeling variations, it is possible to cover a remarkably broad range of results. The maximum power level reached after the reactor trip varies from 534 to 904 MW, the range of the time of the power maximum being close to 30 s. Compared to the total calculated transient time of 100 s, the effect of the secondary side modeling is extremely important.