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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
Kazuhiro Sawa, Isao Murata, Shusaku Shiozawa, Mikio Matsumoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 106 | Number 3 | June 1994 | Pages 265-273
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, a small amount of fission products (FPs) are released from fuel elements during normal operation, and condensable FPs plate out on the inner surface of primary cooling system components. In a depressurization accident, plated out FPs would be forced to reentrain or lift off by chemical and/or mechanical forces. The amount of liftoff FPs is important because they have a potential hazard of radiation exposure to the environment. In order to investigate the behavior of FPs under the rapid depressurization condition caused by a large-scale pipe rupture accident, blow down, wipe off, and leaching tests were carried out. It is observed that the liftoff of plated out FPs is caused not only by desorption but also by mechanical phenomena such as break of microstructure on the metal surface in the rapid depressurization condition. Then, it is considered that the liftoff fraction would depend on the fraction of migration of FPs into the oxide film or base metal.