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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 84 | Number 3 | July 1983 | Pages 196-205
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE83-A17789
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The phenomenon of film destabilization due to an externally applied pressure transient has been investigated experimentally by Inoue and Bankoff. This film collapse process is of interest with regard to vapor explosions. An important step in vapor explosions is believed to be the onset of the rapid heat transfer between the molten fuel and coolant caused by pressure-pulse-induced film boiling destabilization. A dynamic film boiling model was developed to analyze film destabilization, and to predict from Inoue's experiment over a range of initial pressures and final shock pressures, shock rise times, and heater surface temperatures. The model indicated three important results. 1. The nonequilibrium model shows better quantitative agreement with the data while the equilibrium model generally underpredicts the peak heat flux qp by a factor of 2 to 3 for short shock rise times (τp ≈ 80 µs). 2. Both models neglect the effect of interface distortions due to Taylor instabilities. This physical effect should increase the predicted values of the peak heat flux. 3. The film collapse process can be successfully modeled using an equilibrium model for shock rise times >100 µs and is in agreement with the nonequilibrium model. One possible inference from this analysis is that the suppression of vapor explosions due to initial conditions (e.g., ambient pressure) is caused by the increasing difficulty of collapsing the vapor film. Thus, to overcome the effects of these initial conditions, a more energetic trigger needs to be applied to destabilize the film and to induce the explosion.
