Essential Safety Requirements Research Articles

Achieving high burn-up in fast reactors

A theory is proposed, relating irradiation swelling in metal fuel with burn-up, and used to predict fuel-element behaviour under various fast reactor conditions; good agreement is obtained with known behaviour sufficient to substantiate the general conclusion that fission-product gas accumulation is chiefly responsible. It would appear impossible to eliminate such swelling, only to reduce and accommodate it. Based on this principle, a fast reactor fuel-element is suggested using unalloyed uranium, with substantial voidspace in a strong can. This should be capable of 4 per cent average burn-up at 700°C centre temperature under practical fast reactor conditions, which should be sufficient to ensure economic power. With oxide fuel it would appear that, in order to satisfy the essential safety and economic requirements in a fast reactor, it is also necessary to incorporate considerable voidage in the fuel and to employ a strong can; safety requirements could also lead to double-canning. Such an arrangement could possibly attain 10 per cent burn-up, which is comparable to 4 per cent with metal fuel. A cermet of UO 2-PuO 2 dispersed in uranium metal, again in a strong can and with void space in the fuel, appears a suitable way of combining the good properties of both oxide and uranium fuel, and could result in an excellent high burn-up fuel for fast reactors, though its behaviour is more uncertain to predict.

The blood bank and homologous serum jaundice: a review of medicolegal considerations.

UNDOUBTEDLY the most unsatisfactory situation in blood banking today is the inability to exercise any real control over the hazard of transmitting homologous serum jaundice by whole-blood transfusions. The risk is inherent in every bottle of blood issued. The problems of control are multiple: no donor's history is really reliable; any donor may be an innocent carrier; no laboratory test, or group of tests, is specific for the virus of hepatitis; there is no way of treating the blood to kill the virus without violating essential storage or safety requirements for whole blood; there is no susceptible laboratory test animal . . .