ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Jan 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2026
Nuclear Technology
January 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
Jeff Place on INPO’s strategy for industry growth
As executive vice president for industry strategy at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, Jeff Place leads INPO’s industry-facing work, engaging directly with chief nuclear officers.
C. Don Fletcher, Mark A. Bolander
Nuclear Technology | Volume 81 | Number 1 | April 1988 | Pages 52-62
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34078
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In Westinghouse four-loop pressurized water reactors (PWRs), many long small-diameter instrument tubes are employed to route flux monitoring instrumentation lines from the lower plenum of the reactor vessel to a flux mapping seal table. A recent safety concern is that a seismic event could hypothetically rupture instrument tubes at the seal table, effectively causing a lower plenum small-break loss-of-coolant accident (SBLOCA). Continued cooling of the reactor core during a SBLOCA requires depressurization of the primary coolant system such that emergency core cooling (ECC) injection flow balances the break flow. For a lower plenum SBLOCA, the break remains liquid-covered, thus retarding primary coolant system depressurization. As a result, for continued cooling of the core, the break must be sufficiently small such that ECC flow balances break flow at elevated pressures. This study investigates instrument tube ruptures at the seal table location. Separate effects analyses investigate instrument tube pressure and heat loss, instrument lines remaining within the tubes, and tube nodalization effects. Systems effects analyses evaluate the significance of the safety concern through a best-estimate, single-failure analysis for the Zion-1 PWR.