From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 03:52:05 MDT
On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 12:31:25AM -0700, John Marlow wrote:
>
> Windscale.
Early 1950's research project goes wrong -- emphasis on 'research' --
and there are inadequate contingency plans in place because nobody has
envisaged a reactor catching fire before. Not likely to be repeated!
> Idaho Falls. Brown's Ferry.
Dunno about those two ...
> Three Mile Island.
Operators fucked up big-time; result was a release of seven Curies of
radiation and a damaged reactor core. To put this in perspective ...
> Chernobyl
... released two hundred MEGA-Curies. (And Windscale was also a mega-Curie
range release, IIRC).
> Who needs terrorists? Another Chernobyl seems far more likely.
Disagree.
Chernobyl's reactor design was badly flawed: the RBMK was a civilianized
verison of a military plutonium production system, IIRC. And it had *no*
containment vessel! If the Chernobyl reactors had western-style protection
vessels, there might well have been no release of radiation into the
environment at all, or a release on the same order as TMI (as in: worrying,
but no long-term catastrophic effects).
Now, we have new designs like the pebble-bed reactor showing up -- designs
optimized for modularity, fail-safe modes, and reliability. Physically
blow up a PBR by planting a bomb under it, and at worst you scatter fuel
elements all over the landscape in the form of ceramic "pebbles" that you
can pick up with a long pair of tongs. Melt-downs simply Can't Happen
in this design -- loss of coolant makes the reactor go sub-critical,
and there are mechanisms in place to allow it to dump waste heat safely
from the core. Oh, and they're thermally more efficient, mechanically
simpler, and you can switch them on and off almost as easily as a gas
turbine plant.
_That_ is the future of fission power.
In the meantime, here in the UK the current (and future) government has
announced -- quietly -- a policy of increasing renewable energy from 3%
to 10% of the electricity supply by 2010, mostly by building wind turbines.
And there is some (equaly low-key) muttering about replacing the ageing,
1950's-vintage, Magnox reactors with something newer.
-- Charlie
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