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A comment on First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima plant. Parent comment

Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by transistor-man on Friday February 15, 2019 @04:55PM (#19175072)
@ Melting down fuel to determine its properties, the US just restarted a facility that does exactly that! The TREAT reactor purposely melts fuel to determine its failure points and to study new cladding materials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_Reactor_Test_Facilit...

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Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by ChuckMcM on Friday February 15, 2019 @05:38PM (#19175384)
Very cool with a link to a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0o4P_F4s9s where you can watch a fuel rod actually melt.

Glad to hear they restarted it last year for additional research into these topics.

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Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by nate_meurer on Saturday February 16, 2019 @01:46AM (#19177434)
Holy shit, wikipedia says it handles transients of up to 19 GW. They don't say for how long, but the transient control rod actuators take a quarter second to cover their full range, so I'm guessing that means 19 GW for up to a quarter second. That's about 4.5 gigajoules. As it happens, that's roughly the explosive energy of 1 ton of TNT. From a reactor core the size of a small closet. Makes me wonder, in fascinated terror, what power output we're seeing in that video.

Wikipedia says it can simulate six different reactor loop types. This is a seriously impressive facility.

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