Quote:
Originally Posted by All Darc
I imagined Fukushima was safe for inside problems, but they get a ouside problem, the tsunami which destroyed a power station (ironicly isolated from energy production of the reactor itself) that feed the water pumps.
So I presume a true passive nuclear safety would have faced no problems in Fukushima scenerai the dy of the tsunami. AM I right?
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If you want to shut down the reactor you don't want to be trying to generate power at all.
A reactor like an AP1000 is going to be putting off something like 1 megawatts or 3.4 billion BTUs per hour worth of heat when you try to turn it off after the first time it's started. That's like the heat from burning around 150,000 pounds of propane per hour.
That heat can be moved away from the reactor very easy with even a fairly small amount of coolant flow.
The tsunami wiped out the backup systems.
Passive systems like the gen 3 plus drown the reactor with a lake of water held above the reactor.
Just imagine a decent size wood pallet fire trying to boil an entire lake of water, it cant.
The huge lake is there incase a jammed control rod failure, which i dont think has happened since gen 1 reactors.
If it had been a gen 4 molten salt reactor nothing would have happened. If the reactor tried to melt down the freeze plugs melt out of the reactor core emptying the contents into a graphite containment vault.
Be we don't have those yet because all the ignorant people who are afraid of anything nuclear some how keep blocking funding.