[ale] OT: Nuc reactors and Japan

[Jim Kinney]

The molten salt stuff looks like an engineers dream. But salt is
phenomenally corrosive and molten salt is even more so. I see material
engineering issues all over that design.

Then there's the pebble bed reactors. They use pumps to keep them hot enough
to run. Pump fail = shut down by gravity.

The biggest issue I've seen in all reactor failures has been human error.
For 3 Mile Island, a decision was not made to shut down a reactor that was
showing some temperature instabilities once it became known there were other
issues with instrumentation. Chernoble was a total cluster f*%k of wrong
decisions. The Japan screw up is a strangeness of design: the pumps require
electricity to run - it a power plant; why does the power plant not have
power?

Is nuclear power perfectly safe? Nope. Will it ever be? Nope. Can better
engineering make it safer? Oh yeah! Are we (US) investing in the research to
reach that goal? Not really. We have a fair amount of theoretical work going
on but there's only so much that can be done in simulations before the only
reasonable next step is to build one.

Some time back I was mulling over the basic reactor design of using a liquid
for heat transport to turbines and the born rods used for moderating the
reaction (neutron absorption) and hit on an idea: Design the reactor core
such that the control rods are fixed, the core "floats" on high pressure
jets of the cooling liquid over the rods. A loss of cooling flow will
automatically cause the core to descend over the rods and slow the reaction
rate. Seems simple until the use of freaking molten salt is added as a
cooling. Or liquid sodium.

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:26 AM, scott <scott at sboss.net> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
>
> that talks about the Salt-Based nuclear reactors.
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky*
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