A Review of Criticality Accidents, 2000 Revision (LA-13638)
Los Alamos National Laboratory report LA-13638, 158 pages, cataloguing documented criticality accidents for the use of criticality safety practitioners.
Report LA-13638 is Los Alamos National Laboratory's review of criticality accidents, the 2000 revision, 158 pages. A criticality accident is an unintended nuclear chain reaction in fissile material outside a reactor designed to sustain one, and this volume collects the documented cases for the people whose work puts them at risk of causing the next one.
The cover shows power and energy traces from a criticality excursion in solution, taken from an experimental report on the SILENE facility: the burst of power against time that a solution produces when it goes critical. The title page states that the report is approved for public release with unlimited distribution, and that the laboratory is operated by the University of California for the Department of Energy.
A catalogue of this kind is meant to be searched by resemblance. An engineer with a particular vessel, concentration or handling step looks for accidents that involved the same one.
Provenance
- Original source
- https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ML003731912.pdf
- Collected
- This copy
- 3.6 MB · 158 pages · archived here
- Rights
- Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
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