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Old August 21st 05, 01:36 AM
Christopher P. Winter
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On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:23:36 -0500, Pat Flannery wrote:



Christopher P. Winter wrote:

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.



I'd never heard of it before; the photo has an odd history behind it- it
was first posted on a Los Alamos website:
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/testpix/
But at least my machine won't do an enlargement of the photo on that
website.
But another website had copied the photos:
http://www.wps.com/archives/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/
...and this is where the big photo is from.
There's more details of the KIWI program and this particular test he
http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/c04rover.htm
The KIWI reactors seemed to suffer a lot of problems from the
description given there.
I wonder if the flames visible in the photo are burning LH2?


I think so; and I guess the LH2 tank went up a few seconds after the
reactor blew -- hence the fact that the metallic debris so far outpaces the
fireball in the photo.


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.


The report says it's a KIWI B reactor and they apparently used two types
of fuel arrangements; uranium dioxide with niobium carbide coating, and
uranium dioxide sealed in graphite blocks.


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.


Well, maybe they didn't list this one as a accident, as it did exactly
what it was intended to do- exploded. :-)
Still, this seems to be a really off-the-wall test to conduct; maybe
they wanted to see what launch site contamination would be like in case
of a catastrophic failure of a nuclear rocket motor.


Let me rephrase that to make it clearer: I haven't seen contamination
from the NERVA program mentioned by anyone. Accent on the "anyone".
Greenpeace, for example doesn't mention it -- but they do list the dispersal
of 1.2kg of plutonium from a re-entering U.S. satellite in 1964.