In rec.crafts.metalworking Chuck Sherwood wrote: (snip)
When I watch the HC when they run shows on parts of history I know pretty well, they always have major screw-ups. Sounds like they are running par for the course here.
(snip)
Which is why there are now quite a few different designs for intrinsically safe reactors. There is a video out there on the web somewhere where they pull all the control rods out of the reactor of one of these new designs. It just shuts down. The control rods are required for the reactor to run at all. Put them all in, and it only runs at it's rated level of heat generation. Pull them, and it just shuts down. You can't get a meltdown with that design.
Another design uses liquid sodium metal as the coolant. It is also required for the reaction to take place. You have a coolant leak, it shuts down. Biggest screwup there is trying to hose down the coolant with water. Build the place so all of it's fire suppression systems are not water based and you get rid of that danger.
But the containment building is still full and deteriorating. Want to go near it and fix it? I don't.
What I learned is that things WILL go wrong and the consquences are very high. It went wrong in Russia and it went wrong at TMI. Accidents can and do happen. If you want to build a series of reactors in uninhabited areas then maybe, but not near any inhabited areas.
You're kidding, right? This is one of the things that got mentioned in the documentaries but it obviously didn't get noticed by many: After the meltdown (in Chernobyl Unit 4 IIRC) and during the cleanup work they were still running the other (three?) units at Chernobyl continuously, because they need the energy too much to simply abandon them. They were rotating operators in until they got close to radded out, then sent them back to their home powerplant.
I think they're STILL running the other units at Chernobyl, they just told the operators 'No Experiments, Period'. If someone knows otherwise, I'd like to find out.
There are much safer designs available for nuke power then TMI or Chernobil. There are designs that do not rely on water for moderating fission, but use fuel in pelletized form, each surrounded by its own graphite envelope. Those can never melt down and containement is fairly simple technology based on cement. Strangely enough this is french technology and quite abbundant in France. They are not breeder reactors, therefore do not create material that can then be refined and used bombs. Since we were in a race to aquire as many bombs as possible during the cold war, all our old designs for nuke power plants were intrinsically less efficient and far from foolproof. The soviet designs had even less safety features.
The fear of nuke technology is akin to saying that great grandma was hurt badly in a model T car accident when the windshield shattered and cut her, and therefore I'm not trusting cars nowadays and I rather use the donkey cart.
(which is probably cheaper nowadays, but if everyone did, the smell would be unbearable and commute would take a couple days)
small personal nuke plants, sealed and delivered like a septic tank, with a breaker switch and 4 wires coming out or a an inlet and an outlet pipe for the do it yourselfer.
As an example, there is (or at least used to be 25 years ago) a small reactor at the University of Washington that sits near the center of Seattle, Of course this is a very small (about 400 sqft floor area) pile surrounded by graphite and lead blocks and used mostly for irridating samples but it is a reactor. I assume that most major cities have similar. If things went wrong, there would be a nasty mess to clean up.
Although nuclear is not wholly "safe" (when those in charge pronounce it Nuke-you-ler, it gets a little scary and makes one wonder if they can ever be made safe with dingbats in charge), it isn't all that bad relative to chemical and pesticide plants, etc that are already scattered all over. The real problems with nuclear are related to stupidity of operations, building the dang things without a plan on where to put waste, "cheating" for profit (Hanford releases nasties all the time because it's cheaper) and similar.
It seems that there is great opposition to the technology when the opposition needs to be directed at the boneheads administering the technology. Boneheads can be fixed in theory.
Even IF the technology could be run safely, it would probably be more cost effective to put the same money into technologies of efficiency on the use end. Also, breaking some of the stupid habits of americans that waste energy (turning up the heat rather than putting on more clothing) would reduce need.
Several examples exist that could easily save at least as much as our consumption growth. For one, we highly subsidize the highway system for truckers when the same or less money going into a rail system would use less energy per pound mile. There is no subsidy help right now for the millions of jobs that could be done via telecommuting (cheap fast internet like in Japan) which would save a ton more in use. And of course there are improvements in fuel economy for autos that haven't been put in place because there is no profit in it. Even your dryer would be far more efficient with new microwave dryer technologies that no one seems interested in save other countries.
Funny that the survivalism guys seem to support the "suck up more oil cheap" philosophy. I would have thought they would be the first to try and get "off grid" and embrace lower use energy situations and localized energy sourcing rather than global/country centralized energy.
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