Nuclear technology in French

The fourteenth entry is l’accident de perte de réfrigérant, and the noun that closes it is a trap that shuts quietly, because our lookalike exists and means something narrower. In French, le réfrigérant is whatever carries heat away: the water of the primary circuit here, the air of a cooling tower, the oil around a transformer. It is the ordinary word of the trade, and le caloporteur stands beside it in the same sense. Our « refrigerant » will not do that work. It has settled on one thing only, the fluid that goes round a refrigeration cycle and is meant to boil — the charge in a fridge or a heat pump — and in French that is le fluide frigorigène, a different word again. What a reactor loses in this accident is its coolant, which is why every English report prints « loss-of-coolant accident » and the initials LOCA. One more room in the French word is worth knowing, because it turns up in chemistry: on a laboratory flask, le réfrigérant is the water-jacketed glass tube we call « a condenser ».