25 years ago

[Billie Bonce]

One of the factors that the Soviet reactors didn't have that contributed to the widespread release of radiation was that they didn't have a containment vessel, while other Western nuclear reactors did have one.

It's more like a PR story to explain everything to everybody.

It's not a question of Soviet/Western, it's only a question of principle of the reactor. I can say a lot about it, but it's better to read an article in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
This type of reactors can't have a containment vessel of the type that pressurized heavy water reactors have. But it can have a full containment building. RBMK had a containment structure, but not a complete building. The explosion took place inside the reactor core, and it was powerful enough to destroy the building. So, it's a big question what type of containment should be to localize the emission of radioactivity in case of such event. I can say for sure that there are no such type of structures anywhere. The scale of the accident was much higher than anything that could be localized.

Real problems of the design were high positive void coefficient and faulty design of control rods.

Look at the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis: the reactors involved are about 30 years old, older than the ones at Chernobyl, yet the radiation released, while obviously not good, are far, far less than that released in 1986. The difference there was that there was a containment vessel on the reactor vessels at Daiichi while the reactors at Chernobyl didn't, not to mention more competent operators at Japan.

Actually, they were 32-40 years old, and they for sure should be decommissioned earlier. TEPCO was planning to decommission only the 1st unit.

But the accidents are totally different, so it's not correct to make direct comparisons. In Chernobyl unit 4 there was an explosion inside the reactor core, in Fukushima it was partial meltdown of several reactor cores due to lack of cooling. One could compare Fukushima with Three Mile Island accident. The release of radioactivity at Fukushima is only 10 times less than in Chernobyl, and much higher than in Three Mile Island.

I can't advocate operators in Chernobyl, but I have to say that I can't see any great competence in Japan, too. The reactors were shut down automatically, the emergency generators started automatically, then they were destroyed by the tsunami due to great fault of the design of the power plant, and the personnel failed to restore cooling of the reactors during many following days, they also failed to prevent hydrogen explosions, and the first is due to bad design, but the second I consider as a great incompetence.

[Duncan Edwards]

Well, i'm not a hippie at all but i just wanted to make clear, that this issue is not that easy.

Indeed it's not. How much blood and treasure has the United States poured into keeping that oil flowing for the last fifty years? It makes nuclear power look very cheap by comparison.

[water_bug_62208]

I say keep the politics and personal opinions out of this.

I do believe Billie's trying to point out that there was the suffering of the many due to the mistakes of a few. From what I understand of the incident, it shouldn't have happened in the first place. It has, so let's learn, improve, and move on.

Like it or not, in one fashion or another, nuclear power is a part of this world. It's never going away no matter how much people scream against it... after all, what do you think the Sun runs off of? The day the nuclear furnace of the Sun stops working is the day everyone will have something else to worry about instead of the nuclear power plant down the road.

As the saying goes... there is no such thing as a harmless substance... only harmless ways of using it. Even water and oxygen will kill you, if not used properly... and people can't live without those. Think about it.

It all comes down to the human factor... humans are, after all, their own worst enemy.

[Mynock]

That's a joke isn't it??

Not at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fu ... e#Back_end
Scroll down to the part about waste disposal. Quite a bit of what it has to say comes right back to my statement concering the age of most nuclear plants being the problem. Newer designs produce far less (and less toxic) waste, and in the case of the theoretical "Traveling Wave" design, could even use the waste from older reactors as fuel. Win win situation right there.....
Is it a perfect form of energy production? No, absolutely not. It's the best of a bunch of bad decisions. If it were feasible I'd love to see the entire world powered by solar,wind or other "green" technologies (although how green they are is another subject I love to argue over) but, reality check, that's not going to happen any time soon.

[nachtjaeger]

I am still amazed that the Japanese reactors didn't have a secondary backup cooling system. Something really high-tech, like a tank full of borated water on top of each containment building? I guess that would have cost extra. I also can't believe they were storing that much spent fuel on site. I mean, what country doesn't have a safe, secure nuclear waste disposal site? Who could be that. . . uh, never mind.

[Billie Bonce]

I am still amazed that the Japanese reactors didn't have a secondary backup cooling system. Something really high-tech, like a tank full of borated water on top of each containment building? I guess that would have cost extra. I also can't believe they were storing that much spent fuel on site. I mean, what country doesn't have a safe, secure nuclear waste disposal site? Who could be that. . . uh, never mind.

Why aren't you amazed by the fact that both the on-site emergency generators and the equipment for connection of any external emergency power source were located in the basements of the buildings - only a few metres above the ocean? And all that was in a country that invented the word 'tsunami'. It was not a question of some technology yet-to-be-invented. It was a question of placing the emergency generators on a concrete pedestal several meters high.

[Duncan Edwards]

I am still amazed that the Japanese reactors didn't have a secondary backup cooling system. Something really high-tech, like a tank full of borated water on top of each containment building? I guess that would have cost extra. I also can't believe they were storing that much spent fuel on site. I mean, what country doesn't have a safe, secure nuclear waste disposal site? Who could be that. . . uh, never mind.

Why aren't you amazed by the fact that both the on-site emergency generators and the equipment for connection of any external emergency power source were located in the basements of the buildings - only a few metres above the ocean? And all that was in a country that invented the word 'tsunami'. It was not a question of some technology yet-to-be-invented. It was a question of placing the emergency generators on a concrete pedestal several meters high.

Or you could do something more inventive such as is done at the Diablo Canyon power plant on the California coast. They can be fed cooling water by gravity from reservoirs located on the hill above. No power, no immediate problem. Water always flows downhill.

The Japanese were focused on a monster earthquake and didn't foresee the consequences of such a monster tsunami. Fortunately the reactors did shut down automatically when the earthquake began and they were spared the dirty aftereffects of an exploding reactor core like Chernobyl. Very fortunately for both situations there were heroes who stepped forward to mitigate the effects of the disaster.

[SmileyMcDeath]

Look at the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis: the reactors involved are about 30 years old.....

THAT is the real problem. What we need to do is start scrapping the old outdated ones, and replacing them with newer, safer models. Of coarse, to do that, you have to deal with the NIMBY crowd....fucking hippies.
Personally I've always been an adovcate of nuclear power. It has it's drawbacks but for the most part it's a safe, fairly clean way to generate power (and before you argue with me over the waste issue think about how easy it is to safely store used core rods vs capturing and storing the emissions of a coal fired power plant).

I'm as liberal as they come, and I'm praying we start moving to nuclear in a major way. We need those Generation IV plants and we need them yesterday. Our energy needs are going up, and will continue to go up. We're already in the early stages of a full-scale global fresh water shortage. Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, and will continue to become moreso. Every part of the planet is using more energy than ever and use is only going to continue to increase. I think that these problems can be solved, but, since we're still struggling to solve energy storage and transportation problems for renewables such as solar and wind, even as useful as those are, I can't see any way around it--I think we're going to need nuclear.

I've been watching the ongoing disaster in Japan and asking myself if it's really worth it--asking myself if I'm wrong, if it's too dangerous to use. But as horrifying as that's turning out to be, I *still* can't stop supporting nuclear power. The alternative looks like it's going to be to shiver in the dark after a Malthusian collapse. All I can do is hope that the Gen III plants in construction and the Gen IV plants in the pipeline are reliable and as safe as they can build them.

I'm not trying to open a pro/anti-nuclear debate about it here, and I won't get involved in political debates for the same reason I refuse to engage anyone in religious debates and give the people who do a wide berth--they tend to turn ugly as all hell, with resentment and hurt feelings all around. I don't even know if this fits into the discussion here, on this page. I even debated whether or not to post this after I typed it up, but...well, there it is. My opinion, and worth pretty much nothing more than that. We need nukes, and they have to be built *somewhere.*

[dlodoski]

...I'm as liberal as they come, and I'm praying we start moving to nuclear in a major way. We need those Generation IV plants and we need them yesterday. Our energy needs are going up, and will continue to go up. We're already in the early stages of a full-scale global fresh water shortage. Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive, and will continue to become moreso. Every part of the planet is using more energy than ever and use is only going to continue to increase. I think that these problems can be solved, but, since we're still struggling to solve energy storage and transportation problems for renewables such as solar and wind, even as useful as those are, I can't see any way around it--I think we're going to need nuclear.

I've been watching the ongoing disaster in Japan and asking myself if it's really worth it--asking myself if I'm wrong, if it's too dangerous to use. But as horrifying as that's turning out to be, I *still* can't stop supporting nuclear power. The alternative looks like it's going to be to shiver in the dark after a Malthusian collapse. All I can do is hope that the Gen III plants in construction and the Gen IV plants in the pipeline are reliable and as safe as they can build them.

I'm not trying to open a pro/anti-nuclear debate about it here, and I won't get involved in political debates for the same reason I refuse to engage anyone in religious debates and give the people who do a wide berth--they tend to turn ugly as all hell, with resentment and hurt feelings all around. I don't even know if this fits into the discussion here, on this page. I even debated whether or not to post this after I typed it up, but...well, there it is. My opinion, and worth pretty much nothing more than that. We need nukes, and they have to be built *somewhere.*

ditto.

If only the fat cats in this country could be convinced that they could get rich off of nukes and electric cars, our foreign policy wouldn't be dictated by the needless perpetuation of gasoline supplies....

[julie]

I'm not a scientist or anything but since our govts love to plan space trips, I have a great idea, put spent fuel rods on a rocket, and launch them into the sun