Can the US learn to love nuclear power again after Three Mile Island?
Just build it above the Line of Sorrow.
does Godzilla love stomping trains?
Boiling water nuclear power is insanity. If you can’t flip an off switch and walk away from something within a few hours without having it blowup and contaminate everything for 100,000 years. That is what I call insanity. Not to mention the nuclear waste.
Can’t let a couple coincidences lining up ruin nuclear power for the whole country. Earthquake causing a tsunami at high tide, swamping and clogging the outlets for the water cooling system. It wasn’t operator error, but the plant should have been shut down. Better off spending the time and money getting it back online than risk keeping it operating.
Bookmark
I’ll confess this here...
About 10 years ago, I developed a habit of watching the news from Tokyo at lunch (probably the late night news for them). They had a fifteen minute segment on Fukashima.
So I thought “Jesus Jones! When did that happen? It must have been ten years ago, and what, some folks got their basements damp?” Then I looked it up...
Nah, it was the third anniversary and 2,000+ dead.
So Japanese news isn’t high on my list of interests.
Well, they learned to love it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
Regards,
Yes. Especially when they see how bad things are over in Europe as a result of foolishly making massive sacrifices to Gaia.
It’s not about “loving” nuclear power.
It’s about what is necessary.
They mush have a shortage of two headed fish huh Irv.
In other words, it was what the IT crowd describe as a "PICNIC" error (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer).
Chernobyl was the result of the classic Russian mindset, notably as espoused by the plaque that Soviet Admiral Sergey Gorshkov had hanging in his office: "Лучшее - враг хорошего" (usually commonly transliterated to "'Better' is the enemy of 'Good Enough'").
They built what essentially was the cheapest possible style of commercial reactor. Compared to the pressurized water reactors that western nations favor, the graphite-moderated RBMK was less expensive, less complex, required less skill and precision to build, and could run on less pure (and less expensive) fuel. And while it was not irredeemably dangerous, it did have fewer design safeguards, notably it was susceptible to entering an overheating positive reinforcement loop (due to what engineers call "a positive void coefficient"). If an RBMK reactor were to overheat, unless the operators initiated the correct countermeasures, the overheating would accelerate until it destroyed itself.
Ironically, the accident was the direct result of an attempt to conduct a test of the emergency shutdown procedure. Only the test was conducted outside of prescribed safe operating parameters because the knucklehead in charge at the scene ordered it be done so.
No, the reactor did not pass the test.
Conversely, a pressurized water reactor (=expensive & complex) uses water as both moderator and coolant. If the reactor were to overheat, the coolant would boil off. Since the coolant also is the moderator, this boiling off would concurrently cause the reaction to slow, which would rein in the overheating.
The simple fact is that no form of energy production yet devised is completely safe. Even striking a match is not without risk. But more people die in coal mining incidents in the US every year than have died in all the US's nuclear accidents combined.
The US Navy is the master of Prometheus' fire. They operate more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined. The vast majority of them are on floating platforms, some of them even sink and then come back up on command. To date they have accumulated more than 5400 reactor-years with ZERO reactor accidents and zero deaths. And mind you in all cases and for so long as they remain at sea, the full crew's compliment lives no more than than 600 feet from a live, throbbing nukular reactor.
The Navy has had exactly one incident on any nuclear vessel requiring that any crewmembers so much as be medically examined for possible radiation exposure. That was the the USS Guardfish in 1973. And it wasn't the reactor's fault, some swabbie opened the wrong valve and allowed radioactive coolant to escape.
The US Navy serves as proof that nuclear energy can be safe, possibly safer than all other forms.