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| Thread ID: 68471 | 2006-04-30 00:56:00 | Nuclear power. | Cicero (40) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 450805 | 2007-06-13 13:20:00 | There is nothing simple about Nuclear Engineering. Once you have a fissioning pile (which you need to generate heat) it can overheat and melt through the containment vessel and contaminate or worse explode and blast superheated radioactive steam into the upper atmosphere.And the whole point of modern reactor design is to prevent this. It needs a constant energy INPUT to keep the whole reaction going, without it the fuel doesn't have enough density for a critical mass. Sounds like you are talking about fusion, which has self annihilating process characteristics but still very dangerous and has not been achieved in any meaningful way so far, except for the big one which has sustained us for so long, the Sun.No, I was talking about fission. I do know the difference. If you think Nuclear Reactors are safe you have bought into the BS that the vested interest corporations have been broadcasting for so long. When will people learn that you cannot trust the people (corporations) who stand to gain when they tell you about their products, how can you be so naive?Because having seen the way they are designed to work, I believe they are safe. If you think modern nuclear reactors are unsafe you have bought into the BS that the vested-interest anti-nuclear campaigners have been broadcasting for so long. How can you still believe that they are not safe, when all the evidence points to the contrary? How can you be so naive? The scientists can and are bought as well. Money is a very powerful incentive to see things the way the paymaster does, surely that is obvious, Universities are not above this behaviour as well.Of course - this has been going on for years. However money doesn't change the fact that something works well, reliably and above all safely. |
Erayd (23) | ||
| 450806 | 2007-06-13 13:23:00 | en.wikipedia.org "These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor.[9]. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage. There was none. Later problems with the AVR reactor resulted in a small release of radiation to the public." This illustrates my point that something always goes wrong. I recognize this is not the model you are refering to. However this is: "Criticisms of the reactor design The most common criticism of pebble bed reactors is that encasing the fuel in potentially combustible graphite poses a hazard. Were the graphite to burn, fuel material could potentially be carried away in smoke from the fire. Since burning graphite requires oxygen, the fuel pebbles are coated with an impermeable layer of silicon carbide, and the reaction vessel is purged of oxygen. While silicon carbide is strong in abrasion and compression applications, it does not have the same strength against expansion and shear forces. Some fission products such as xenon-133 have a limited absorbance in carbon, and some fuel pebbles could accumulate enough gas to rupture the silicon carbide layer. Even a cracked pebble will not burn without oxygen, but the fuel pebble may not be rotated out and inspected for months, leaving a window of vulnerability. Some designs for pebble bed reactors lack a containment building, potentially making such reactors more vulnerable to outside attack and allowing radioactive material to spread in the case of an explosion. However, the current emphasis on reactor safety means that any new design will likely have a strong reinforced concrete containment structure [11]. Also, any explosion would most likely be caused by an external factor, as the design does not suffer from the steam-explosion vulnerability of water-cooled reactors. There is also significantly less experience with production scale Pebble Bed Reactors than Light Water Reactors. As such, claims made by both proponents and detractors are more theory-based than based on practical experience. Since the fuel is contained in graphite pebbles, the volume of radioactive waste is much greater, but contains about the same radioactivity when measured in becquerels per kilowatt-hour. The waste tends to be less hazardous and simpler to handle. Current US legislation requires all waste to be safely contained, therefore pebble bed reactors would increase existing storage problems. Defects in the production of pebbles may also cause problems. The radioactive waste must either be safely stored for many human generations, reprocessed, transmuted in a different type of reactor, or disposed of by a method yet to be devised. The graphite pebbles are more difficult to reprocess due to their construction, which is not true of the fuel from other types of reactors. Proponents point out that this is a plus, as it is difficult to re-use pebble bed reactor waste for nuclear weapons. Critics also often point out an accident in Germany in 1986, which involved a jammed pebble damaged by the reactor operators when they were attempting to dislodge it from a feeder tube. This accident released radiation into the surrounding area, and led to a shutdown of the research program by the West German government." |
zqwerty (97) | ||
| 450807 | 2007-06-13 13:37:00 | en.wikipedia.org "These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor.[9]. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage. There was none. Later problems with the AVR reactor resulted in a small release of radiation to the public." This illustrates my point that something always goes wrong. I recognize this is not the model you are refering to.You're right, I wasn't referring to a pebble-bed reactor, but most of the article does in fact back up my point of view. Your quote refers to experiments done in the 1980s, on a 1966 reactor design - we've come a long way since then. I'm not trying to argue that things don't have the potential to go wrong - of course they do. My argument is that the consequences of something going wrong are now negligible. |
Erayd (23) | ||
| 450808 | 2007-06-13 17:24:00 | Talk about it as much as you like,the fact is ,in a hundred years it will be the norm. Meantime let procrastination rule. |
Cicero (40) | ||
| 450809 | 2007-06-13 22:44:00 | A thermal station powered by the heat in this thread would power my torch for weeks, and absorb the effluent too ;) while the hot air (once the heat was harvested) could allow our wind farms to be placed in a formerly sheltered area. It appears that we have two main difficulties - the cost of shielding nuclear reactors, and the gross overpopulation of the world. Forget the shielding, put the reactors wherever undesirables congregate and allow time to equalise the situation. For an immediate energy saving, do away with daylight saving. The energy involved in that extra hour of daylight is astronomical. |
R2x1 (4628) | ||
| 450810 | 2007-07-28 10:43:00 | More reasons not to have Nuclear Reactors in NZ: www.sciencedaily.com |
zqwerty (97) | ||
| 450811 | 2007-07-28 22:17:00 | Over a million people are killed on the roads each year,lets ban the car. | Cicero (40) | ||
| 450812 | 2007-07-28 22:22:00 | There are too many problems with nuclear power, although I still support open debate about it (in the news media and in government circles). One big problem is our proximity to earthquakes and volcanoes. It is my belief that advances in solar cell and wind/wave/tidal technology will push any nuclear option to the bottom of the list. Last week I read that scientists in the USA made a breakthrough in solar cell power, with efficiencies up to 45%, and there are plans for gigantic magnetic levitation wind turbines that will produce enough electricity to power a large city. In ten years there should be working solar - wind - water generators that will save the day. |
Morpheus1 (186) | ||
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