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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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A webinar, and a new opportunity to take ANS’s CNP Exam
Applications are now open for the fall 2025 testing period for the American Nuclear Society’s Certified Nuclear Professional (CNP) exam. Applications are being accepted through October 14, and only three testing sessions are offered per year, so it is important to apply soon. The test will be administered from November 12 through December 16. To check eligibility and schedule your exam, click here.
In addition, taking place tomorrow (September 19) from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. (CDT), ANS will host a new webinar, “How to Become a Certified Nuclear Professional.” More information is available below in this article.
Bassam I. Shamoun, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 1 | July 1996 | Pages 35-45
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental observation has shown that the assumption of complete fuel fragmentation in a vapor explosion by the shock adiabatic thermodynamic model results in predicting upper bounds for the shock pressure, propagation velocity, and work output. This model has been modified by considering the condition where the assumption of complete fragmentation of the fuel is relaxed. A methodology is adopted using experimental values of the shock pressure and propagation velocity to estimate the initial mixture conditions of the experiment and the mass fraction of the materials participating in the explosion. Analysis of a steady-state subcritical vapor explosion in one dimension has been carried out by applying the conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy and the appropriate equation of state for a homogeneous mixture of molten tin and water. The KROTOS-21 experiment, conducted at the Joint Research Center at Ispra, Italy, was used as the initial benchmark experiment in this analysis. A quasisteady explosion pressure of ∼3 MPa and a propagation velocity of ∼200 m/s were obtained in this experiment. Using this model, the estimated minimum mass of the fragmented fuel was found to be 0.21 kg (3.2%) of the total mass of the fuel. The predicted work output by this model corresponding to the aforementioned fragmented fuel mass was found to be 9.8 kJ. The estimated initial void fraction of the vapor was found to be 11.5%. In these analyses, a comparison is made of the various possible closure relations applied to the detonation wave theory for a vapor explosion and associated concerns of model stability in the two-phase region.