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First astatine-labeled compound shipped in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) on March 31 announced the successful long-distance shipment in the United States of a biologically active compound labeled with the medical radioisotope astatine-211 (At-211). Because previous shipments have included only the “bare” isotope, the NIDC has described the development as “unleashing medical innovation.”
Nicholas T. Saltos, Tunc Aldemir, Richard N. Christensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 82 | Number 2 | August 1988 | Pages 187-210
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34107
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An efficient variational method was developed to solve the transient radial-azimuthal heat conduction problem in nuclear fuel rods under loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA) conditions. The method is efficient in that it is fast, accurate, and compatible with the modular accident analysis codes already in use in the nuclear industry. The methodology uses the Lebon-Labermont restricted variational principle, with parabolic trial functions in the radial direction and circular trial functions in the azimuthal direction, to reduce the transient heat conduction problem in the rod to a set of first-order ordinary differential equations in time. These equations are then solved by an explicit technique. The solution is in a readily usable form (i.e., averages and gradients can be determined without interpolation) and the same algorithm is used for both one- and two-dimensional problems. The solution technique allows changing the trial functions at every time step to obtain an accurate solution with minimum computing time. The methodology is implemented for a single rod under hypothetical LOCA conditions in order to (a) investigate the sensitivity of the predicted radial-azimuthal temperature distributions to the choice of the trial functions, (b) investigate the importance of nonlinearity effects (i.e., temperature dependence of thermal properties) on rod response, and (c) compare the variational and finite difference techniques with respect to computation time and accuracy of the results. It is shown that the variational technique leads to substantial reduction in computing time (more than a factor of 3) for comparable accuracy.