From: John Marlow (johnmarlow@gmx.net)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 14:04:14 MDT
#
On 1 Jun 2001, at 10:52, Charlie Stross wrote:
> 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 ...
#Brown's Ferry WAS the unlikely repeat of Windscale, AFTER decades of
design refinements. Some idiot with a lighter was checking for leaks
in flammable insulation (if you can believe that), torched it, and
both the main AND redundant backup wiring ran past the torched wall
(if you can believe THAT)... Teller: "Nothing is foolproof. The fool
is always bigger than the proof."
#Idaho Falls: Major malfunction. Three dead, if I recall--one pinned
to the ceiling of the containment dome by a control rod. Head and
torso buried separately in lead coffins.
>
> > 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 ...
#No one knows--or says--how much was actually released. The detection
devices just happened to have been turned off, remember? (At least,
this is my recollection of local newspaper stories at the time.)
>
> > 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).
#Second-rate nations will continue to build reactors designed by
second-rate engineers and run by third-rate controllers. Brown's
Ferry was done by the supposedly first-rate guys. San Onofre (is it?)
is built on a faultline in California, right beside the ocean.
>
> 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.
#You pick them up.
;)
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.
#Yeah; mechanisms in-place. Which can be turned off/bypassed by some
idiot. It's happened before. Happened at TMI because of a stuck gauge
telling operators to do the wrong thing.
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.
#Fission power has no future, if we're lucky.
jm
>
> 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
>
>
John Marlow
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