Operating Experience, Yankee Rowe nuclear reactor (1964)

This is a film from the third international "Atoms for Peace" conference in 1964 summarizing the operational experience of the Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts.
This was digitized by whatisnuclear.com thanks to Last Energy.
whatisnuclear.com/news/2024-0...
Original 16mm film courtesy of the US National Archives.
00:00 Intro
01:15 Summary of reactor equipment
02:05 Soluble boron and instrumentation
02:49 Controls
03:14 Vent and drain
04:08 Fuel transfer
04:29 First core
05:10 Core 1 performance
06:29 Core 2
07:49 Core 3
07:49 Core 3
08:42 Maintenance and ops
09:40 Economics
10:20 Outro

[@jimsvideos7201]

Same planet, different world.

[@stdorn]

Sold! Ill take 2 please.

[@Nighthawke70]

No you don''t want this one. They shut it down due to embrittlement of the reactor pressure vessel. This is scrutinized at all reactors past, present, and future. And it was a small (180MW) reactor compared to the ones under construction or in production at the time of decommission in 1991.
The small Westinghouse PWR at Wolf Creek in Kansas operates at 1250MW due to a upgraded steam turbine.

[@FixItStupid]

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[@stdorn]

@@Nighthawke70 Would that be tritium embrittlement? Is there such a thing?

[@Nighthawke70]

@@stdorn You are thinking about Neutron radiation embrittlement. It was a big deal during the first decades of reactor operations. There was a few reactors that went prompt critical due to that. SL-1 was one such unit. The center rod got stuck, forcing them to use brute force. Unfortunately, the reactor was a lousy design, for a single rod out would cause a prompt criticality event. This cost 3 lives and made a mess of the Idaho test center.

[@KevinBalch-dt8ot]

This reactor was often cited in one of my undergraduate nuclear engineering textbooks “Nuclear Reactor Engineering” by Glasstone and Sesonske. It’s still on my bookshelf even though I retired a few years ago.
One of my professors was a consultant to Yankee. My senior project involved writing a FORTRAN code for evaluating incore detector signals for Yankee Rowe.

[@whatisnuclear]

I'm sure that FORTRAN code is still in use at some other reactor. We use FORTRAN codes that were originally written in FORTRAN IV (1960s!) to this day.

[@michaelgreen3036]

I studied this core design in college and used its design parameters for a senior design project. It has smaller diameter fuel rods than what is typically used in '70s era 3000 MWt reactors. It also does not have control rods in the fuel bundles. If you look at the fuel bundle at 6:50 you will see the bundle is not exactly square, missing some fuel rods on two sides. This was to allow space between the bundles for cruciform shaped control blades.

[@whatisnuclear]

Oh yeah I can see the notch for the control blades there! Very cool.

[@FixItStupid]

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[@jaeweld19]

It's so sad that we developed all this amazing technology 60 + years ago and because of stupid politics, our planet is now dying. I know nuclear power has waste but solid waste is much easier to contain.

[@FixItStupid]

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