On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 01:11:48 -0500, Pat Flannery wrote:

Stumbled on this interesting photo from 1965- this was the KIWI TNT
(Transient nuclear Test) test; a KIWI nuclear rocket test reactor was
purposely given a runaway nuclear reaction to see what its failure would
result in: http://www.wps.com/archives/wxvax7.e...ages/ktntb.gif

Pat,

Thanks; I hadn't seen that one before.

Note the railway tracks for scale, and the flying sparkling stuff- which
given that uranium is pyrophoric, I assume are the uranium pellets from
the reactor's fuel elements.

Would they have used uranium metal, or mixed oxide? I'd guess the latter,
but I haven't studied up on NERVA. In any case, the fuel elements ought to be
clad with something. They're probably just incandescent.

Aren't these things supposed to melt down? This looks like an SRB
exploding.
How would you like to have been sitting on top of that when it
malfunctioned?
I'll bet this was one fun clean-up job.


Indeed. But it's puzzling -- I've been researching nuclear accidents for
a couple of months now, and I've seen no mention of contamination from the
NERVA program.