In the design of a reactor and its associated plant systems the involvement of safety engineering is total. Safety appears in the selection of design concepts, the design itself, and as an evaluation of the design. The safety of the plant being the subject of the Preliminary and Final Safety Analysis Reports which are submitted in support of plant construction and operating licenses, in the final analysis may be an overriding consideration in the production of the nuclear power system.

Because of the total involvement of safety engineering at all stages of the design and in all sections of the design, the field of reactor safety requires an immense range of technical skills. In the past, reactor safety engineers have been drawn from the ranks of those who are specialists in one single area of reactor technology and who have attained experience enough to recognize the required wide background necessary for the assessment of safety. Nevertheless in any safety group it has always been necessary to cover the whole range of skills required by providing for a number of personnel with different backgrounds. Ideally these engineers should be subjected to an overall reactor safety course to enable them to think and speak in a consistent manner with respect to safety.

Modern university curricula instruct in sccialist skills each of which may be limited to a single technical field. It is therefore important to superimpose upon the basic university instruction, preferably as early in the educational process as possible, applied safety courses which emphasize and show the interactions among a range of skills drawn from many different fields. The short extra-curricular course is not likely to provide the balance and depth of understanding needed for valid training in safety.

The present volume is intended to fill the need for a university text for reactor safety applied to fast reactors in general and applied to liquid-metal — cooled fast breeders in particular. Liquid-metal-cooled fast breeders are the favored fast reactor concepts for the major nuclear countries of the world and therefore the emphasis is pertinent to our future needs.

One may ask why such a volume is not first devoted to the present genera­tion of nuclear power plants—the thermal pressurized and boiling light water systems. The answer is that undoubtedly such a volume is needed but that the author’s experience leads more directly to the fast reactor. However it is worth noting that all but Chapters 4 and 5 of the present volume also apply to the thermal reactor system and a thermal reactor safety engineer will also find the book of use.

The book is intended as a university text for graduates and undergraduates in nuclear engineering who are attending courses in reactor safety. Safety engineering encompasses mathematics, thermal hydraulics, fluid dynamics, control theory, logic analysis, nuclear physics, structural mechanics, stress analysis, metallurgy, licensing regulations, meteorology, health physics, and a host of other technical fields. It is therefore necessary to require that the student and the reader should possess certain prerequisites. The minimum should be a basic knowledge of differential calculus, nuclear reactor theory, and some heat transfer and fluid dynamics.

The text of the book has been used in teaching the subject of fast reactor safety at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and the feedback from the presentation there has greatly improved the book. I am grateful for the comments received from my students.

The text also owes much to work performed by other organizations in­cluding: the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, the Atomic Energy Commission, Argonne Na­tional Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the British Nuclear Energy Society, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Liquid Metal Engineering Center, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society for Testing Materials, the Boeing Company, and Westing — house Electric Corporation. Many individuals have also helped the work by their criticisms as well as by material contributions, and John Zoubek should be singled out for his assistance in several sections of the book.

I am particularly grateful to Dr. R. G. Cockrell for his continued help and constructive advice and to my wife for her encouragement, enthusiasm, and tolerance of the curious habits of someone hampered by the lack of sufficient hours in the day.