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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.
Michael Avery, Jun Yang, Mark Anderson, Michael Corradini, Earl Feldman, Floyd Dunn, James Matos
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 3 | November 2012 | Pages 249-258
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-69
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental study of low-pressure, natural convection critical heat flux (CHF) has been carried out with full-scale fuel pins, simulating typical Training, Research, Isotopes, and General Atomics (TRIGA) reactor conditions. The test section is an annular upwardly flowing channel formed by a round tube and a simulated fuel pin heater rod with a chopped-cosine power profile, located in the center of the tube. Experiments were performed under the following conditions: inlet water subcooling varying from 10 to 70 K, pressure varying from 110 to 200 kPa, and natural circulation mass flux up to 400 kg/m2s. CHF was observed, and associated data have been compared with selected CHF correlations. It has been found that the CHF increases as the pressure or mass flux increases, but does not significantly depend on the inlet subcooling. Among the numerous presented CHF data and correlations, few data exist, and no specific correlations have been developed for TRIGA reactor conditions. Because of the lack of specific correlation, the correlations of Bernath, El-Genk et al., Mishima and Ishii, and Block and Wallis have been used to estimate the TRIGA CHF outside of their intended ranges of applicability. These correlations are evaluated against the current experimental data.