Posted on 05/15/2005 8:06:54 AM PDT by ricks_place
All safety systems depend on "the laws of physics", meaning physical principles. The problem with physical principles is rarely the principle, it's their application.
You are right, no system is safer than the training and experience of its operators. I doubt airbags and crash tests are worth more than an alert, experienced and sober driver.
The whole point of "inherently safe" reactors is that they do not depend upon human elements or hardware or a control mechanism. The "inherently safe" reactors depend only upon physics, the laws of nature.
Just as a rock does not fly off the earth due to gravity "inherently safe" reactors do not meltdown due to physics. Specifically adiabatic temperatures, material melting points, heat transfer properties, and so forth.
Certain physical principles are pretty much immutable - rocks don't roll uphill, you can't melt granite over a campfire, etc.
If you design your systems in such a way that the nuclear reaction is equivalent to a rock at the bottom of a well, then there's no human intervention needed to make sure the rock doesn't suddenly climb up out of the well on its own accord.
Yes, and in the 1970s they were predicting doom because of global cooling. Here's an article from Newsweek, April 28, 1975.
Newsweek. What do you expect. Next they will be telling us the Govt is destroying Korans.
It processes and thereby reduces the collossally-long-lived fission byproducts that are otherwise a major storage dillemma. Its output's half-life is measured in the hundreds of years...instead of millenia.
And the design we perfected before the program was completely disbanded had successfully shown off a working prototype design that would be safe in every concievable accidental operations contingency. Coolant failure, control failures, you name it they tested it, and the reactor just more or less automatically shut itself down safely.
Of course, to get the Greens to go along, we do need a much more eco-euphemistic name, as "breeder" somehow connotes something sinister in the average Green-brain. I would recommend something along the lines of "Long-Term Recycling Reactor"...as this is a fix for a long term problem...and it does it by recycling what is otherwise waste from our old-fashioned reactors.
Put it back.
We shouldn't kid ourselves - building a fast breeder reactor, which produces 20% more fuel than it consumes - is no small technical challenge. Such efforts have been fraught with difficulties for a very long time, but research and development efforts are ongoing around the world.
Given the price of uranium and reprocessing, it may be just too early for the cost/benefit analysis of breeder reactor technology to make sense.
We actually perfected the design way back 13 years ago. Then shut the program down. [ Note who would have been President ]. One of the project's main engineers is a FReeper. Forgot his handle though.
By design, of course, I meant the proof-of-concept prototype. Which would then nearly need scaling and "industrializing".
lol..."Breeder" is a poor name selection ...a derisive name for couples who have children.
"Neutralizing Reactor" works for me. Greens will love the neuter reference.
To solve the waste disposal problem, the IFR had an on-site electrorefining fuel reprocessing unit that recycled the uranium and all the transuranics (not just plutonium) via electroplating, leaving just short half-life fission products in the waste. Some of these fission products could later be separated for industrial or medical uses and the rest sent to a waste repository (where they would not have to be stored for anywhere near as long as wastes containing long half-life transuranics). It is thought that it would not be possible to divert fuel from this reactor to make bombs, as several of the transuranics spontaneously fission so rapidly that any assembly would melt before it could be completed. The project was canceled in 1994, at the behest of Bill Clinton's then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary.
Until there's an earthquake, flood, lightening, hurricane, plane crash,....
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain...
Research should continue, new approaches studied, it's just that human history continually proves that nature sides with the hidden flaw.
Well Duh, getting it into the ground is preferable to eating it.
Its all the time it spends on the surface being handled and moved around the country before it gets into the ground that concerns me.
Look at New Jersey, wsb.
That's why nuclear engineers are schooled in the concept of "Defense in Depth."
A truck lost in your neighborhood with a load of Tri Sodium Arsenic?
Or a prison inmate halfway house 1.5 miles from your home?
As a society we handle both, but one gets a lot more air time than the other.
You have right. It is still silly.
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