sketerpot wrote:
That's silly, though. China Syndrome was about a meltdown melting down to the groundwater. At TMI, the reactor vessel contained the meltdown. And if it hadn't, there would still be the containment structure, designed for exactly this sort of task. And then there's still some ground between the reactor and any groundwater.
And at Chernobyl the core melted down, drained out of the containment vessel which was broken open and into the basement levels, but did little more then that. It takes an awful damn lot of heat to melt through concrete, and when the material has melted down the fission reaction mostly stops, limiting the amount of damage that can occur.
The whole China syndrome nonsense assumed that fission will just keep going full bore when you have a pile of hot uranium, but in fact it wont without a moderator, otherwise the reaction will poison itself.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
While there has never been a meltdown bad enough to surpass Chernobyl, there are instances where reactors have been badly made or looked after leading to leaks of irradiated water, waste being improperly stored or cracks appearing in shielding. I'll have to dig around for the article I read this in, but at the end of the day the nuclear power companies are only human and they need strict regulation and expertise to keep them running, though this is using older, less remarkable reactor designs. The likes of the PBR concept are self-limiting, which makes such problems a thing of the past.
In order to meet world demand today, a lot of work would need to go into making such reactors right now and in quantities never before seen. Assuming you can physically do that, there's still a lack of specialists in the area because, again, the whole industry has been sorely lacking in investment over the last couple of decades. Concrete, steel and uranium is far easier to get than technicians needed to run the plant.
The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Where is Tribun with his proof that nuclear power is eeevvviillll? The world wonders.
I PMed him earlier too when I saw him post in the 'RAR America Hot Dog!' thread. His behavior strongly hints at deliberate avoidance of this thread. He can't, however, avoid the consequences of it forever.
Sea Skimmer wrote:The whole China syndrome nonsense assumed that fission will just keep going full bore when you have a pile of hot uranium, but in fact it wont without a moderator, otherwise the reaction will poison itself.
My God, they actually thought that a nuclear reactor can run without a moderator?
You'd think that at some point in the production of the movie they would have hired someone who knows how a nuclear reactor works. If they had done that, they might have heard about how a moderator is needed to slow neutrons, and that the heat from fuel rods in a loss-of-coolant incident comes mainly from decay of fission products with very short half-lives.
Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't just show the thing exploding with the force of an H-bomb.
The movie was more to do with the fact that the cooling system was dodgy and any reactor problem could cause contaminants to explode into the local atmosphere. I don't recall them ever talking about an actual China Syndrome happening to the extent that people think it will (molten uranium burrowing to CHINA!), but a poorly made containment system with irradiated steam among other things isn't good news. Chernobyl didn't need such a fanciful syndrome to do major damage, which is why when it comes to nuclear it's the people who make and operate the reactors that concern me, not the physics.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:Assuming you can physically do that, there's still a lack of specialists in the area because, again, the whole industry has been sorely lacking in investment over the last couple of decades.
Hasn't France continued to invest in nuclear? Last I heard over 80% of their electricity was generated by nuclear plants.
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
