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Characteristics of Nuclear Facility Waste Bag Fires

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Abstract

Waste bags from nuclear facilities filled with plastic personal protective equipment were tested to measure their fire hazard. Heat release rate (HRR), smoke yield and incident heat flux from waste bag fires were measured in a room/corner test apparatus. Three different size bags were tested in the corner of the room in order to check the effect of waste bag size. Full size waste bags were tested in the three different locations: in the center, in the corner and against the back wall of the room in order to check the effect of location. Bag fires can produce high HRRs (~800 kW) indicating that special caution is needed for waste bag management in nuclear facilities. Different size bags burn in a similar manner which allows a simple analytical tool to be developed to estimate transient HRR. In addition to the analytical tool, smoke yield and heat flux data can be used to simulate the waste bag fires and to validate fire model simulations.

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Acknowledgments

The authors greatly appreciate the support for this work by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC (AC818440) and Department of Energy (DE-AC09-08SR470). Many thanks go to Randall Harris at WPI for conducting the room tests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fire Protection Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA

    Young-Geun You, Haejun Park & Nicholas A. Dembsey

  2. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, Aiken, SC, USA

    William B. Till Jr, Eric R. Johnson & Jason Butler

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  1. Young-Geun You
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  2. Haejun Park
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  3. Nicholas A. Dembsey
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  4. William B. Till Jr
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  5. Eric R. Johnson
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  6. Jason Butler
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Correspondence to Nicholas A. Dembsey.

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You, YG., Park, H., Dembsey, N.A. et al. Characteristics of Nuclear Facility Waste Bag Fires. Fire Technol 51, 129–152 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-013-0368-z

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