Re: Former Anti-Nuclear Activist Does A 180

On Dec 10, 7:34 pm, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
Jan Panteltje wrote:

If you compare the number of death in coal mines every year,
to the number of death due to nuclear power, then it seems to me
nuclear is the way to go

It's a compelling argument.

If you don't spend too much time thinking about how to balance the
steady loss of life in mining accidents against the significant risk
of a huge loss of life if a nuclear reactor does a Tjernobyl or
worse.

Chernobyl was close to being about as bad as a civil nuclear reactor
fire can get. They cannot explode with a nuclear detonation the fuel
is nowhere near enriched enough and even if it was you would still
require a compression wave implosion to set the thing off. You might
generate a lot of unwanted heat, and even a largish conventional
chemical explosion, with a very nasty pulse of neutrons and gamma rays
through an accidental uncontrolled criticality though. It would be
messy and best avoided by intrinsically safe design.

Tokai-mura managed to do that in 1999 in a fuel reprocessing ***-up.
It was luckily self limiting.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip52.htm

Western reactors aren't capable of 'doing a Chernobyl'. Indeed there has never been a western
design anything like it. Notably, above all else, all western reactors have a proper
containment building which Chernobyl lacked.

Western reactors probably are capable of doing a Chernobyl under
sufficiently unfavourable circumstances - be grateful that it hasn't
happened yet, but don't make the logical error of assuming that what
hasn't happened yet can't happen,

Under what circumstances would any western reactor accident result in the core being exposed to the
open air ?

The Windscale fire was pretty close to that. Cockcrofts follies were
not up to the task once the core was well alight.

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sc=2047059

And the Dounreay radioactive caustic soda plant could easily have gone
up had the damage that hot liquid sodium and fast neutrons was doing
to pipework not been noticed in time. Bulk sodium + water doesn't mix
well.

Modern designs should be intrinsically safe by design. But you never
can tell how dumb a suicidal experiment some idiot in the control room
can come up with to defeat all the safety systems.

A Scientific American discussion of reactor safety pointed out that no
design was proof against someone dropping a nuclear bomb on it, which
would release enough radioactive isotopes to sterilize half of Europe.

That's a very silly thing to say. There'll be plenty of other problems if nuclear war breaks out.

I think what was actually said in the SA article I saw was that none
of the existing designs of nuclear reactor were guaranteed to be
capable of withstanding the sort of fuel laden 747 attack that
levelled the World Trade Centre. I don't know about in the US but I
believe there are air exclusion zones around UK nuclear plants.

And there are sufficient other simple compounds and scenarios that
could be used by terrorists to make a nuclear bomb very dirty if they
ever managed to get hold of one. Military strategists prefer clean
airbursts since they want to minimise fallout and maximise blast
damage, but that is not necessarily true for a terrorist.

Regards,
Martin Brown
.

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