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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
Liqiang Hou, Dahuan Zhu, Qing Wu, Jian Deng, Xiao-li Wu (Nuclear Power Inst of China)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 578-583
The focusing effect of the metal molten pool plays an important role in elevating the validity of the In-Vessel Retention (IVR) during a severe accident while the melting of the shroud and basket can contribute to the formation of the metal molten pool. Therefore, the study on the melting behavior of the shroud and basket can offer technical support for the validity analysis of IVR. The method of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to establish a two-dimensional calculation model of the 1/8 core of ACP1000 to study the melting behavior of the shroud and basket during the severe accident of large LOCA. The core has been divided into ten nodes in the axial direction and the radiation model and the solidification and melting model have been considered during the calculation. The results show that the shroud at six out of ten nodes and the basket at five out of ten nodes have melted totally before the first significant migration of the core and that the basket always starts to melt after the shroud has melted totally at the same node.