Talk:BORAX experiments

BORAX links

They were outdated. I could not find the equivalent on anl's current site so I substituted the archive.org version. BenBurch 02:48, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Borax?

Why is it named after a borate mineral? Mang (talk) 21:17, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Ref1: "These reactors were known as the BORAX (Boiling Reactor Experiment) series." Jamesday (talk) 07:38, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Breached containment claim

If you wish to re-add a claim that the destruction of the BORAX-1 reactor breached containment please provide some reference that:

1. describes what the containment structure was.
2. says that the containment structure was breached.

It will be helpful if before doing that you read the containment structure article to find out what a containment structure is, briefly "in its most common usage, is a steel or reinforced concrete structure enclosing a nuclear reactor ... to contain the escape of radiation to a maximum pressure in the range of 60 to 200 psi".

Moving on briefly to what Uriamme added and I removed as wrong, a claim that the excursion breached containment:

1. this reactor had no containment structure. It was a reactor core in an essentially open pool of water. That's why the water flew out of the pool during the low power excursions: there was no containment, nor even a fully sealed reactor vessel like the one in SL-1 to stop it. SL-1 also lacked a containment structure, it was just inside a building, not a containment structure. You can't breach a containment structure if there is no containment structure there to breach.
2. Uriamme added a convenient video that:
   1. Has a narration that says "burst the open reactor tank" at 3:05 in the video. An open reactor tank is not a containment vessel, though this part was referring to one of the earlier tests - there was a partial seal on the top of the water tank during the final test.
   2. Has nice video looking down into the pool at 1:10 that shows the lack of containment - you can see directly into the pool of water in which the reactor core sits through the screen that shields the camera.
   3. Shows the earlier and final excursions that illustrate the complete lack of even a building around the reactor, let alone a containment structure of some sort.
3. The water and eventually control rods and other things came out of the reactor pool. Agreed. But an open pool of water isn't a containment structure, so those things leaving it aren't a breach of a containment structure. Even if it had a building around it, that building wouldn't necessarily be a containment structure.
4. You may also find "Overview: How the Borax Reactor Came to Be" of use. Specifically:
   1. "While earlier versions of the Borax experiments were conducted outdoors in the open air, Borax III was contained within the shelter of a sheet metal building" on page 2. Neither the open air nor a sheet metal building are containment structures.
   2. "Cutaway Drawing of the First Borax Reactor" on page 10.
   3. Page 17: "All the early Borax tests were conducted with the reactor tank open on top to the atmosphere. The reactor tank was technically designed to operate at a pressure of 300 lbs/sq. inch with the tank lid in place. The lid was installed so that testing could be done at pressure. During the last experiments that summer, the reactor was operated at successively higher pressure and for longer periods. I don’t remember anything peculiar about these tests except that the reactor tank was poorly designed and, at pressure, it leaked badly from under the lid and from the flanged joints of the tank". A badly leaking lid on top of a pool of water isn't a containment structure, but it did mean that the core was then in a leaky reactor pressure vessel instead of completely open to the air.
   4. Page 18 "Since there was no building over the reactor, the water eruption seen from the highway appeared to be coming up out of the ground". No building also means no containment structure.
   5. Page 28 "The test was very dramatic, resulting in a genuine explosion that lifted the contents of the entire shield tank and scattered it in pieces over about an acre of the desert terrain. The control rod drive assembly went up into the sky as a unit until restrained by the numerous electrical cables connected to it. A mixture of water, smoke, steam and debris surged skyward. A loud impressive explosive report followed, delayed by the couple of seconds that it takes sound to travel the half mile to the control trailer. Pieces of semi-molten fuel rained down out of the sky". Note the complete lack of any description of any form of building or containment structure being breached before the things could fly all over the place. The same lack is seen in the video.

There's a big difference between things flying away from a reactor core that has no containment and a containment building being breached. Jamesday (talk) 22:50, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of containment amiss. First off, let's talk about how nuclear fuel is typically contained. Often, primary containment is in a fuel plate, a fuel that has been encapsulated in an alloy, or in some cases it is in an enclosed cylinder that may be called a fuel rod. Whatever holds the fuel inside, separating it from another substance (like air, water, coolant, or other pieces of metal), is its primary containment. Primary containment is often a metal. Additionally, the fission products are contained inside this containment.

Now, most reactors have roughly five or so layers or levels of containment. Each layer often uses steel or concrete. Pools of water aren't seen as a form of containment because a pool is by definition open and not contained on the top. So for example, the fuel is encapsulated in a ceramic ball (1), located inside a metallic fuel plate (sort of like the little dots in a slice of salami) known as the cladding (2), which is located inside a steel reactor vessel (3), which is located inside a sealed reactor room with steel walls (4), which is located inside a sealed concrete building (5). In my example, there must be 5 breaches for fission products or fuel to escape to the atmosphere or to the ground outside.

Whatever the situation was when BORAX-I was destroyed, the end result was the contamination of the environment, including the air and the ground nearby. This is evidenced by the fact that an exclusion zone exists at the old site and it is a "Superfund" site that needs to be either "cleaned up" or "monitored periodically" due to its contamination and radioactivity. In short, there was a complete breach of whatever containment that the reactor had, because fission products and fuel can only contaminate an area if containment is breached. Containment was breached at Three Mile Island, too, but the release was intentional, brief, controlled, and only gasses were released. The BORAX-I reactor "experiment" was intentional, uncontrolled, and has permanently contaminated the soil.

There is no way to argue that the fuel was not clad without you providing a source. To argue thus, you would have to assume that the fuel was bare, as in lumps of enriched uranium set in between the control rods. Contemporaneously, the U.S. government was building and operating S1W prototype for the USS Nautilus about 10 miles away, and the Experimental Breeder Reactor I was literally across the street making electricity. A massive reactor was also nearby called the MTR (Materials Test Reactor). All of these used fuel that was clad in something that would contain it. There weren't any reactor experiments in Idaho done with bare fuel to my knowledge. This was the 1950s, not the 1940s.

Furthermore, there is no record of any contamination of the environment by any of the other BORAX-I tests... just the last one that "destroyed" the reactor. In previous experiments, the fuel must have remained wholly or mostly contained in its cladding. Indeed, if the experiments were performed in a pool of water and there was no fuel cladding, then all of the fission products would have been escaping after each test, chemically attacking the water, and contaminating every piece of equipment nearby. So at minimum, there must have been a fuel cladding, and this provided containment during most experiments. Likewise, the destruction had to be a breach of the fuel cladding, which wasn't quite what the scientists were necessarily trying to do. The breach was a vaporization of the fuel and its cladding, which was a magnitude more impressive than the other supercritical excursions. I like to saw logs! (talk) 09:09, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

And according to http://web.archive.org/web/20041010094631/http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/borax_i.html there is no doubt that the fuel was clad in "fuel plates." "Fuel plate fragments were scattered for a distance of 200-300 feet, but no widespread dangerous dispersal was observed." Curious that they never mention the fuel or the fission products that contaminated the area. Enter the EPA years later to force the exclusion zone. I like to saw logs! (talk) 12:55, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

No doubt that fuel left the reactor and parts were fragmented. However, the breached containment claim was linked to the article on containment buildings and that is also the commonly used meaning of what a containment breach is. Fuel leaving pellets or rods or a reactor vessel in which it is contained isn't really what's generally meant by a containment breach. That's something more akin to an unplanned leak from TMI2, perhaps what could have happened if the hydrogen inside the containment building there had exploded.

The remaining description accurately conveys what happened, without using the misleading wording and article link that implies an engineered containment building existed and was breached.

It might be interesting to give more of a description of the core and fuel composition and such at some point in the article. I'm hesitant about this, though. Considering the primary significance of the tests - proving the safety principles of BWR and then PWR designs - there's already a large amount of emphasis on the contamination aspect of just one of the tests. Expanding this risks giving undue weight to a portion of events that was of considerably less significance than their primary purpose. Jamesday (talk) 00:15, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

I still think your TMI-2 example shows a misunderstanding of a containment breach. Fuel at TMI-2 never breached all containment. Only fission products did. The fission products were released in a controlled fashion at TMI-2, bleeding off mainly gasses. To summarize, the fuel at TMI-2 was contained by the reactor building, while a tiny amount of fission products ceased to be contained when they were bled off.

At BORAX, all containment was breached for both the fuel and the fission products because they flew through the open air, landed outside, and contaminated the ground. Such a complete breach of reactor containment is so rare in the history of nuclear reactors that I feel compelled to make note of this.

It is not misleading to say that BORAX breached containment. The misleading part is perhaps the link to the article on containment which leads you to think that containment is a macroscopic, massive structure like a concrete building. Containment starts at the marble-size or smaller. And it ends wherever the public has access to air, water, and soil, which for convenience sake we call the "environment" we humans live in. Contaminating the environment is one way to know that there was a containment breach. I like to saw logs! (talk) 09:35, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

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