Operation Smash Hit - Testing Nuclear Flasks

http://www.FreeScienceLectures.com

When nuclear fuel is sent from powerstations to reprocessing, a simple procedure is used which now has been carried out safely more than 14'000 times.

The fuel rods are first cooled for at least 90 days at power station by immersing them in ponds. When taken out of storage the heat coming from each rod has dwindled to about 25 watts - roughly equivalent to a small electric light bulb.

About 200 rods at a time are loaded into an open top steel skip which is then placed inside a special container called a flask.

The flasks are very robust - they weigh around 50 tons and have walls 35 cm thick.

16 bolts, each able to take a load of 150 tons without breaking, secure the lid.

The flasks are forged out of two blocks of steel. When finished each flask is worth half a million pounds.

Stringent manufacturing and performance standards have to be met. These are drawn up by International Atomic Energy Agency.

To meet these standards the industry has developed a comprehensive testing program. Literally hundreds of impact tests have been carried out using scaled models dropping them so that they land from all sorts of different angles.

In 1983 to enhance public confidence in the flasks a full scale testing of an actual production flask in real life conditions was begun.

A three locomotive train was smashed into a flask going at 100mph.

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Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• nuclear
• fuel
• flask
• power
• station
• rods
• steel
• skip
• bolts
• standards
• iaea
• impact
• test
• train

[blkvicePU]

@SpizyChicken propaganda? are you retarded.....

[defprun]

8:30 was awesome...made my old Tandy look like a supercomputer.

[newforestroadwarrior]

@defprun Pretty certain it's a 19" rack mountable IBM PC. A very expensive system at the time.

[MontytheHorse]

@SpizyChicken Yeah, cause sending a train at near 100mph into a nuclear flask is one of those things that can easily be faked.

[Trek001]

@TheStevewhelan the 46 was due to be scrapped. They decided to send it out with style rather then to simply just scrap it.

[TheStevewhelan]

I was given a copy of the video of this test when I was working for the London Electricity Board way back when and I still have it. A shame to waste a class 46 but did rather prove the point in a "real world" situation

[matelot95]

46009 to be exact

[danlefou]

Class 46, actually.