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IAEA looks at nuclear techniques for crop resilience
The International Atomic Energy Agency has launched a five-year coordinated research project (CRP) to strengthen plant health preparedness using nuclear and related technologies.
Wheat blast, potato late blight, potato bacterial wilt, and cassava witches broom disease can spread quickly across large areas of land, leading to severe yield losses in key crops for food security. Global trade and climate change have increased the likelihood of rapid, transboundary spread.
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.