Posted on 03/30/2021 7:13:55 AM PDT by DIRTYSECRET
"Chernobyl," HBO's five-part mini-series about the 1986 disaster at a Soviet atomic reactor. This film is reasonably accurate historically, well worth watching, and horrifying. Don't watch it right before bedtime! One expert in the film comments that atomic power is wonderful ... when working normally. It emits no heat-trapping carbon dioxide and generates large amounts of electricity. The film, however, depicts the tremendous dangers when something goes wrong. This disaster resulted from reactor operators' mistakes combined with a design fault in the reactor. It rendered the city of Chernobyl and around 1,100 square miles of surrounding land uninhabitable for centuries. But it was nearly much worse, potentially depopulating all of Europe. Drastic actions organized by the Soviet government prevented total disaster, but shortened or destroyed the lives of many workers sent onto the highly radioactive reactor to minimize the damage it would cause. Modern civilization requires lots of energy, all sources of which have costs and risks. But energy sources don't all have the same level of risks. The Chernobyl disaster suggests that atomic power is neck and neck with hydrocarbon fuels — coal, oil, natural gas — as prime threats to the human race. To protect ourselves from a runaway climate we must phase out hydrocarbon fuels as soon as possible. To avoid massive reliance on atomic energy, the obvious replacement is the fusion reactor only 93,000,000 miles from earth — the sun.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Solar energy needs fossil fuel or nuclear backup. Power plants need to adjust their output to correspond to the demand. Solar power can’t adjust. You are at the mercy of the sunshine, which peaks when the Sun is overhead and goes down to zero at sunset. The Sun gives you very little power in winter, when you need electricity for heating.
These people know that our industrial civilization will come to a halt if solar is the only power. The civilization that has generated enough wealth to give billions to basket case countries will end. They know this. And it is what they intend.
Reactor safety was a MINOR interest of the Soviets in the Chernobyl reactor design. It would not have been permitted to be built anywhere in the West when it was constructed.
It is a classic example of “An accident waiting to happen.”
re: “Solar Energy Doesn’t Need an Atomic Backup”
Phhht; wasted and ‘sunken’/stranded assets BOTH once BrLP’s SunCell Hydrino reactor reachs the market. I’m just “putting it out there” so you can’t blame me WHEN your ‘fave’ primary energy source becomes deprecated in the next decade ...
My neighbor thinks electricity (smart meters) are “frying me from the inside”. So she went off grid to solar panels. The first couple of cloudy days we had, she was knocking on our door, asking to use the phone - batteries were exhausted at her house. She ended up having to buy a $300 piece of equipment to ‘charge’ her batteries and get them going again. It seemed like the solar panel company repair truck was constantly at her house. In the last 2 weeks, the solar panels have come down & the roof where they were has been repaired. She’s putting the house up for sale & evidently, the solar panels & the 4 batteries (@ $2,500 each) that go with them, are not an asset in this area’s market. I’m sure there are solar systems that work better, but this one appears to have not been worth the $$/trouble.
BTW, Brilliant Light Power is going to on another ‘demo’ road trip to Boston in the 4th week this coming April ... there was a demo in a Washington DC hotel back on the 4th and 5th this last February; a 150 kw (150,000 Watt) device was shown with an accompanying talk on the science and verification tests that have been performed to date.
Demo replay 2-4-2021
“DC SunCell Demonstration”, BrilliantLightPowerInc
Is this guy naive?
Why would Newsmax print it if this guy believes transmission lines can go that far w/o too much loss?
The Russians didn’t design a civilian nuclear power reactor, they designed a testbed for experimentation. It also produced power, so that power was put out onto the grid.
Nobody in their right mind would design a reactor with a positive void coefficient that high unless they had a completely different purpose in mind for the facility. The RBMK-1000 should never be associated with civilian nuclear power generation, even though some civilian plants were built off that design. Chernobyl is not one of them. It was a military facility with side benefits for the nearby civilian population. Right until they blew it up.
Is this guy naive?
Couldn’t be! Found this in Newsmax.
The long transmission lines without losing anything. he quotes an electrical engineer.
Both the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters were examples of engineers failure to anticipate all possible human or natural factors in maintaining a reactor.
Chernobyl was caused by the senior operator ignoring all reasonable safety rules of nuclear physics and continuing a test procedure that was unsafe because he would lose his job if he didn’t complete the test on time.
Fukushima was caused by a compound risk event that was never considered by the designers. The earthquake disabled the electrically driven cooling water pumps and the tsunami that followed disabled the backup diesel generators causing the core to meltdown and explode when hydrogen gas generated by the water exploded without a pressurized containment building to prevent it.
All during this time hundreds of other nuclear reactors have been safely operated around the world and in many cases improved by what was learned from these catastrophes. Two technologies, Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and Stable Molten Salt Reactors (SMSR), radically change the complexity and weapon potential of nuclear reactors by scaling down the core size and eliminating the need for active cooling systems to prevent meltdown. They simply make heat, boil water, and drive turbine generators in a self sustaining cycle. If they overheat they shutdown even without a human in the loop.
In the end we can not let an irrational fear of fire drive our engineering decisions or we will have to return to the stone age.
Solar is fine on top of existing infrastructure (houses, businesses, canals, parking lots, etc.). But it’s only useful as a supplement to something providing the base load. Nuclear is a fantastic base load supplier, but it doesn’t ramp up and down quickly.
The wise future would be nuclear plants for base load - built with the option for thorium conversion in the future - with full fuel recycling, and distributed solar (not solar “power plants” plus battery storage taking care of peak loads. No extra space required, significant drop in transmission losses, reliable power coming from the nuclear stations, and the battery storage enabling the nuclear power to have plenty of time to ramp up and down as needed.
THAT is your future power infrastructure. You know, if you could actually build anything anymore without the stupid environmentalists flooding you with lawsuits because some stupid turtle might be hurt.
Triumph of the moronic.
Despite the inherent dangers of such a design, the accident required a deliberate series of exactly the worst steps in order to trigger the explosion.
These steps were taken by the Chief Engineer to finish a safety test he had already false certified as having been done in order to receive a bonus. I believe he was shot for his actions following the inquiry.
You are correct in that there was no containment vessel for the Russian reactor design. As theoretical as Soviet nuclear physicists were, they hung their hat on outdated reactor technology. Remember they stole their tech from the US which built the last type of this reactor in 1962-63 at Hanford. This was the “N” Reactor with a primary mission of producing nuclear bomb material. It was decided shortly after to build the “steam generator” plant near it to capture the steam to produce electricity.
The N Reactor was operating just fine until Chernobyl at which time the Democrat Senators from Washington and Oregon had their own meltdown and caused enough uproar that it was shutdown.
I was a pipefitter at that time and had worked on the N Reactor and on several modern PWR and BWR reactors and the technology and level of building safety was night and day between N and those new reactors.
What made the Soviet reactors a danger was that each station had their own chief physicist who was allowed to conduct experiments to test the capabilities of their systems, which is what caused the accident at Chernobyl. Basically trying to see if they could generate power during shutdown operations until the diesel generators would kick on and operate the water pumps. Apparently there was a minute or so delay from between shutdown and diesel startup.
And, if you wanted to discredit US nukes you’d do exactly what the nimrods did at TMIsland. The operating room was staffed by ex-Navy nukes, AKA cowboys. As former commanders of subs they are used to being treated as gods, do no wrong. So, when something went “bling” instead of doing exactly what the manufacturer said to do (Babcock&Wilcox) they went cowboy and re-routed water in ways sure to screw things up. And, it really did.
Nukes are grossly overdesigned. Extremely complicated instrumentality-wise, but real simple operationally: keep putting cooler water over the nuclear fuel until it cools down. If you do that, everything will be OK. It’s not even as complicated as “steer into the skid” is on a car.
US nukes are safe, so long as you RTFM!
I say this with 20+ years of design, construction, operation of the darned things.
Newsmax has been publishing stuff like this for a number of years.
Recent development is a single tower 'wind power' that can be put up in your back yard. Generates electricity from movement of a single upright 'vane'.
Or build one in a known tsunami area like the Japanese.
What happened to NewsMax? I thought they were a conservative outlet this reads like an Atlantic or Salon article. Runway climate change. Hydrocarbons are a danger to mankind. Give me a break. Want to rely on renewables? Talk to Texas.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.