corium
nounEtymology From core + -ium. Apparently coined in 1974 by Martin Peehs, a German nuclear engineer.
1
A lavalike mixture of fissile material created in a nuclear reactor's core during a nuclear meltdown.
Nuclear physics
- Mexico was given $100,000 to do a series of experiments in which small amounts (10 to 20 grams) of stainless steel and corium (a mixture of 55 percent iron, 10 percent zirconium, and 35 percent uranium dioxide) will be melted and then flooded with water in an arc-melting chamber.1975 21 October, Hearings on the Nuclear Initiative: Technological Concerns in Nuclear Reactor Safety, Sacramento (CA): California Legislature Assembly Committee on Resources, Land Use, and Energy:
- Previous studies of the thermal behavior of corium in a degraded nuclear reactor have focussed primarily on the process of heat transfer within the corium.1991, Sheau-Wen Shiah, Fan-bill B. Cheung, Dae-Ho Cho, Michael J. Tan, Louis Baker Jr., “Numerical Modeling of Corium/Steel Structure Interaction with Downfacing Boiling Boundary Conditions”, in Chung, Franklin, Hochreiter, Larry E., editors, Numerical Modelling of Basic Heat Transfer Phenomena in Nuclear Systems, presented at the 28th National Heat Transfer Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 28-31, 1991, New York (NY): American Society of Mechanical Engineers, page 31:
2 more examples
- The materials of the nuclear reactor—nuclear oxide fuel and fission products, cladding, metallic alloys, moderator, absorbers, structural materials, coolants, concrete, and so on, could melt to form complex, multiphases, and aggressive mixtures known by the general term corium.2011, Pascal Piluso, “Appendix 1: Corium Thermodynamics and Thermophysics, 2. Corium Thermophysics”, in Bal Raj Seghal, editor, Nuclear Safety in Light Water Reactors: Severe Accident Phenomenology, Waltham (MA): Academic Press, →ISBN, page 664:
- CORIUM: INIS: 1977-10-17; ETDE: 1977-06-02 Molten mixture of fuel, cladding and other core structural material resulting from a meltdown accident.2019 October, INIS [International Nuclear Information System] Thesaurus, Multilingual version, IAEA-INIS Reference Series IAEA-INIS-01 (2019/10), Vienna: IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], →ISSN, page 264: