design from the 60s, built in the 70s and ceased production in the 90s
put into operation in late 2010s
what could possibly go wrong
put into operation in late 2010s
what could possibly go wrong
If PBR is to be taken as the flagship of reactor safety (physics prevents a problem from ever occurring), the safety features in Gen II PWR come pretty damn close. You'd need a long cascade of extremely unlikely events in order for it to dangerously fail, for example, the reactor vessel being bent so that the rods are unable to be affected by gravity. Having first breached the concrete and steel whatever caused the catastrophe would also need to bend uranium.
I'd have to double check, but as I recall if you were standing outside the containment vessel, you'd have received the dosage you'd get from sleeping with two other people (potassium-40) ... which we should clearly outlaw right now due to that grave danger (along with living in the Mile High city of Denver, commercial jetliner travel, and eating bananas).
Yes, that's what happened, but I wouldn't say it was planned. Popular wisdom at the time was that the corium should have melted the whole way through the containment vessel. It was only afterwards that they discovered that the water and corium itself helped keep the steel containment vessel cool enough to prevent melting (albeit just barely).[1]
Yes, almost no radiation was released. But we got very lucky. It was close to melting through the containment vessel. "By some estimates, the core was 30 minutes away from melting through the eight-inch-thick steel reactor vessel when cooling water was finally restored."[2]
1. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-30/news/mn-17003_1_nucle...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/tmi/...
The "popular wisdom" is utter propaganda bullshit; have you ever wondered why the popular at the time and mentioned in [1] "China Syndrome" is for some inexplicable reason is not longer bandied about? The design of the reactor vessel allowed for this and withstood the stress without the bigger concrete containment vessel even coming into play. Note even in [1]:
Besides the insulating property of the fuel and the strength of the steel vessel, previous studies had shown the concrete bases on which U.S. reactors are built also would hold up against melting fuel, Beckjord said.
That you are confounding the reactor and containment vessels in your posting suggests to me how effective that propaganda has been.
"You'd need a long cascade of extremely unlikely events in order for it to dangerously fail"
Have we learned nothing at all ? Even when given extremely relevant and instructive examples within the last 10 years ?
From Fukushima to Lehman Brothers, we continue to be shown that these unlikely events are highly correlated - even if they are extremely unlikely individually.
The Tsunami comes with the Earthquake
With Fukushima they knew what the problems were and chose to make an half-assed attempt at safety - for example: the 2008 Tsunami study was ignored. I guess what could be surmised is that nuclear power is only completely safe in the absence of human nature. Which makes you correct in a round-about way.
However, it is unsafe in comparison to what? Nine times out of ten not being able to breath anywhere on the planet, forever, seems like the more dangerous prospect; versus making a specific piece of land uninhabitable for a few thousand years. Nuclear waste is far easier to see, which makes us more aware of it and hence our monkey brains believe it is more dangerous ("smoke just dissolves into the air!").
I can't think of any power solution that doesn't have severe drawbacks; however, nuclear is at the very least not the top contender in that list.
The arsenic and other emissions from a coal plant are roughly measurable to a nuclear MELTDOWN every 10 years.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medupi_Power_Station
Thanks for that factoid.
I don't think Fukushima really needed, or experienced, a long cascade of extremely unlikely events. It was just badly designed, then experienced a not-particularly-unlikely event.
From what I have read into this and taking the data into an untrained eye seems to make sense to use modern nuclear. http://ieer.org/resource/factsheets/types-of-nuclear-reactor...
On the latter factor, Japan has amply demonstrated over 3+ decades they have absolutely no business doing anything in this area (a judgement I reached long before Fukushima). To compare to a vaguely comparable culture, the PRC seems to be doing well, but wonder if that's due to a much greater lack of transparency.
While I haven't looked at it closely, France sure seems to be doing well (76% of their electricity production, at good points and with lots of exports), but the usual political suspects propose to fix that. Canada as well??
The US finished going bat-shit crazy on the subject under Carter (perhaps because he was on the cleanup crew of this first generation (1947) reactor after it suffered a meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRX, and, yeah, it's another reactor with a positive void coefficient). You're not going to see economic nuclear power in the US for the foreseeable future unless you foresee a counter-revolution that removes power from the NIMBYs and BANANAs.
"And when the newer generation’s passive advanced safety features are taken into consideration, the AP1000 reactors should be about 100 times as safe as existing plants."