The Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) accident, which occurred on March 28, 1979, led industry and regulators to enhance strategies to protect against severe accidents in commercial nuclear power plants. Investigations in the years after the accident concluded that at least 45% of the core had melted and that nearly 19 tonnes of the core material had relocated to the lower head. Postaccident exa...

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in light water reactors (LWRs) has been a persistent form of degradation in the nuclear industry. Examples of SCC can be found for a range of materials in boiling and pressurized water reactor environments, including carbon steels, stainless steels, and nickel-base alloys. The evolution of SCC is often characterized by a long initiation stage followed by a phase ...

In the Risk-Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) approach we want to understand not just the frequency of an event like core damage, but how close we are (or are not) to key safety-related events and how might we increase our safety margins. The RISMC Pathway uses the probabilistic margin approach to quantify impacts to reliability and safety by coupling both probabilistic (via stoch...

Pool boiling heat transfer has been extensively studied over decades, but the effect of boundary heating conditions on boiling received little attention. In this work, heat transfer coefficients during pool boiling of five different refrigerants (R123, R245fa, R236fa, R134a, and R22) on the outside surface of a smooth copper tube were measured at the saturation temperature of 6.7 C; water flows...

Mean stress effects on fatigue life of a stainless steel in air and boiling water reactor (BWR) environments were evaluated by load-controlled tests. In stress-life, non-zero mean stresses increase low cycle regime both high air. BWR environment, higher was observed with negative while decrease the limit found for positive one. strain-life, are insignificant. All data well correlated Smith-Wats...

This paper reports an experimental study on nanofluid convective boiling heat transfer in parallel rectangular minichannels of 800 μm hydraulic diameter. Experiments are conducted with pure water and silver nanoparticles suspended in water base fluid. Two small volume fractions of silver nanoparticles suspended in water are tested: 0.000237% and 0.000475%. The experimental results show that the...