During a refueling outage, workers discover black, soft material in the reactor

Question

During a refueling outage, workers discover black, soft material in the reactor core (obviously a Foreign Materials Exclusion Area breech). To help identify the breech source, you are asked to determine the material. You discover that it is ground up bits of PVC piping, but this material is used in several locations. Fortunately, you can narrow the search because the PVC piping comes from unique vendors each with their unique degrees of polymerization. By detailed measurement, you determine that the PVC molecular non-extended (i.e., coiled) length is 7 nm. What is the degree of polymerization?

Explanation / Answer

Lcoil = l x sqrt(m) l is the length of a single bond in the backbone of hydrocarbon chain m is the number of bonds

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