Fish and Type-K
ANL-172
SBLOCA before the acronym
CP-5 Autoclave
Shipping Bolts in Expansion Joints 105-C
Quenching a Quatrefoil
YTB-268
Arikara Muffler
Oriskany Accumulators
EBWR Scale
Stainless burnout in CP-5
Flocculation
GETR Power Level
Fuel Storage
B3B and loop
COOSHOO
SL-1 at
Aluminum Nitride
RTDs
J
FLECHT
Wasted
RADCAL
TMI
Kemeny
UHI ultra high risk
Clerical in Coal (decompose)
HITBIT at WJ
Wench games there
Proposal to feds
HITBIT at UCLA
Penn State Junk
Vent Sizing
Runaway and PRMs
Fouling and PRMs
Core exit thermocouples
So, how do I cover all of the above fast? Each game is involved. Moreover, on the average is it is more of a set of rackets than games although most of the items are games.
Game Silver Nitrate and Berl Saddles. My first pay as a chemical engineer out of the University of Wisconsin, August 1950, was from Hanford Works, Richland, Washington, run by General Electric Company. First I was in the stack gas group for three months where we were proof testing silver reactors for iodine removal from dissolver off gases. As we walked across the test site, the boss, Al Blasewitz asked me where I would place the control thermocouple. I quickly responded that it should be placed at the inlet to the silver reactor. That was done. Later, in service, a batch of callrod heaters melted down when there was power but no gas flow.
Game Fish and Type-K. Next, I spent three months in site survey. Fish from the Columbia River were placed on type-K X-ray paper. The skeleton showed up.
Game ANL-172. This is worth more space than I'll use partly because the experience was helpful about 20 years later when I designed a gamma thermometer with in-core electric calibration that is in use today in some BWRs as well as licensing of the ESBWR. The experiment proved that thermal conductivity of uranium-zirconium alloys is unchanged with accumulated fissions. ANL and ORNL sent an experiment to Hanford that I installed and operated in a production reactor. It was still the early days and I was pretty much left alone. Also, Rickover's gang was not on top of this job and never has been. I pressure tested that capsule assembly and found that it leaked like a sieve. A reasonable approach would have been to send it back to ANL. Instead, I worked out a game to operate the experiment as a nitrogen pressurized assembly which prevented inleakage to the water-cooled capsule. The capsule housed two cylinders of alloy which were water cooled on one face and the temperature gradient was measured. A separate assembly measured the power; it was a thin strip of uranium-aluminum alloy wrapped in a wire heater with thermocouples to monitor a temperature difference. After a week of so of exposure it became apparent that the power meter was deteriorating. I had gas samples analyzed which showed that organic insulation was outgassing. So I purged the capsule by alternately increasing and decreasing the nitrogen pressure until the contaminants were removed and I had a valid calibration point. Thus it was demonstrated that accumulated fissions were not changing the thermal conductivity of the alloy. After a month of so of operation, R. Bergren, a scientist from ORNL, visited and checked my work. He reported that the experiment was being operated in a competent manner. As an aside, Bergren guessed that the power level of the pile was few megawatts; I responded that it was over a hundred times that and he damn near passed out.
Game SBLOCA before the acronym. This is very condensed. It was late 1953 or early 1954. I had been working at ANL since November 1952. Again, Rickover's gang and others had little interest in the pressurized water loop that I was installing in the Material Testing Reactor at the National Reactor Testing Station (S1W had been in operation and things worked). Anyway, I was at the loop during initial runs when a small break LOCA opened up and it could not be isolated. I led the recovery with extreme skill. I valved the low-capacity piston pump to feed the lower end of the pressurizer level standpipe. As the pressurizer level became low, I turned off the 100-A canned rotor pump. Fed McMillan and I valved off the in-pile tube and valved in standby cooling and that was that. There was no failure of the fuel under test. Of course this became a very involved situation. Back at Argonne several months later I overheard a remark that Leyse was nuts to think that the low-capacity piston pump would impact cooling.
Game CP-5 Autoclave. It's torture to be brief. Zinn included this in his Geneva talk around 1954. EBWR fuel, a zirconium clad uranium alloy, was supposed to be corrosion resistant if the cladding leaked. I designed and mocked-up a pressurized water capsule for irradiating bare fuel pins. The air-cooled finned capsule was to operate with subcoled nucleate boiling in relatively cold water. An external expansion chamber was pressurized with nitrogen and this pressure established the saturation temperature and thus the approximate temperature of the 0.10 diameter by 1 inch specimen. Enrichment was 10% so there was self-shielding which would be lost if the specimen disintegrated (power would then increase). End of story.
Game Quenching a Quatrefoil. During the summer of 1954 ANL cancelled my draft deferment and I chose not to be an Army private working on some kind of PWR for the Antarctic at Ft. Belvoir. So I went to DuPont Savannah River Plant near Aiken, South Carolina. One task was extending the time allowed in fuel transfer through air from the water in the reactor to the water cooling in the spent fuel pool. Construction work was slowing and men and equipment were available. I found access to a rejected aluminum quatrefoil (four joined tubes) loaded with natural uranium slugs. A heat treating furnace was available. Nearby the construction gang dug a 2 foot diameter hole about 20 feet deep and installed a steel liner that was filled with water. So, we heated the quatrefoil in the furnace, quenched it in the pool, the slugs remained intact, and we increased the allotted time before emergency cooling would be required in the event of a hang-up during fuel transfer.
Racket Shipping Bolts in Expansion Joints 105-C. The reactor was in cold shakedown and we had assignments. Curious, I looked at an expansion joint in one (of maybe four) primary loops. I could not figure out how that worked. It turns out that the shipping bolts had never been removed although the loop assembly was complete and in the process of hydraulic shakedown. So, I checked around elsewhere. I walked through several pipe tunnels with 2 foot (or more) diameter cooling water supply and return lines. I found several more shipping bolts in place, one was stretched. My young boss, bright but not too wise, told be to write it up, so I issued Shipping Bolts in Expansion Joints - 105-C. That was not a smart move and after about a year on the job I got a 3% raise and decided that I better move on.
Game YTB-268. I left DuPont; the draft board was still there so I went into OCS Newport, confident that I'd wind up in Navy Nuke work. Luckily I was wrong, the San Francisco Naval Shipyard was far better territory for almost three years. YTB-268 was a tug boat with direct diesel drive. As I learned decades later, YTB means Yard Tug Big, however today I found out that it means
YTB - Harbor Tugs, Big
Harbor tugs with more than 800 h.p
| RED CLOUD | YT-268 | YTB-268 |
Game Oriskany Accumulators. Of course there is a lot going on in the conversion of an aircraft carrier. The Oriskany got an angled deck, a mirror landing system, steam cats and a lot more. Right now is submerged off the Florida coast somewhere a site for recreational diving.
USS Oriskany Dive Site, 25 miles south of Pensacola FL
The yard's boilermakers fabricated the accumulators for the steam cats. Those had to be heat treated, but they were too long for the furnace so they were angled from the lower left front corner to the right top corner. We had thermocouples at several spots. Of course, with my quatrefoil experience at DuPont I was an expert in flame management to get an acceptable uniform temperature distribution. It was a night shift operation for some reason and the crew followed my instructions just as if I had that authority. No Shop Master was on the scene.Another Game Oriskany Accumulators was a trivial but important correction. The accumulators were hung from the top and expanded downward. The lower drain line, maybe a one inch line, extended from the bottom, then angled horizontally for perhaps 2 feet and then again angled vertically to a fixed penetration downward through the hangar deck. Anyway it was a bad scene with excessive pipe stress at the fixed penetration. It was corrected by Shop 56 with added bends and length to add flexibility. I insisted that the plans should be corrected, however the piping designers insisted that corrections were unnecessary.
Game Arikara Muffler. The Arikara's muffler was totally shot. I didn't give it a second thought when I told the boilermakers to replace it with stainless steel. Decades later I have looked a bit, a very little bit, into marine exhaust system design. Maybe unspecified stainless steel was not smart. I'll never know how well the Arikara's muffler fared since 1957.
ARIKARA ATF-98
ATF - Auxiliary - Ocean Tugs, Fleet
Fleet tugs for combat operation - having large radius of action, good fire fighting, salvage and all around facilities.
Game EBWR
Scale. So I left the Navy and returned to the Argonne National Laboratory
during November 1958. Immediately I initiated deep investigations related
to fouling of fuel elements in the Experimental Boiling Water Reactor. I
did not label it crud; I called it scale which it was.
I issued several memoranda;
I issued several memoranda;
Effect
of Scale Deposits on Fuel Element Temperatures with EBWR at 100 Megawatts,June 17, 1959,
Thermal Conductivity of Scale on EBWR
Fuel Elements,
December 24, 1959,
Scale on Fuel Elements in EBWR, June 22, 1959,
Post –Irradiation Heating of EBWR
Element H-18, December
18, 1959.
I was free to initiate and execute the above work, and never considered that it could be otherwise. In today's world that would not be allowed, the masters inside the beltway would not allow it and if a proposal was written, the lobbyists would have it killed and the initialtor would be fired. As it turned out, I managed to get the work done before the beltway knew about it. My leader was deadwood and that helped. Also, hot labs and money was there and EBWR was in operation.
http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-17644.pdf
Predictive Bias and Sensitivity in
NRC Fuel Performance Codes
Manuscript Completed: April 2009
Date Published: October 2009
Prepared by
K.J. Geelhood, W.G. Luscher, C.E. Beyer, D.J. Senor, and
M.E. Cunningham, D.D. Lanning, H.E. Adkins
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
P.O. Box 999
Richland, WA 99352
NRC Job Code N6326
Office of
A search was performed for published CRUD thermal conductivity data. There was very little
information found. Leyse (2003) stated a value of 0.8 W/m-K for hydrated alumina in the
Experimental Boiling Water Reactor (EBWR). This is close to the value used in FRAPCON-3.3.
108. Leyse, R.H. 2003. “Unmet Challenges for SCDAP/RELAP5-3D. Analysis of Severe
Accidents for Light Water Nuclear Reactors with Heavily Fouled Cores,” 2003
RELAP5 International Users Seminar, West Yellowstone, Montana, 27-29 August
2003
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