Friend on Nuclear Reactor Safety

Post tags: | reactor_safety |

Online Exchange

Post by Friend

I know this is down-beat stuff (sorry), but people really need to know how criminal regulatory decision making has become. We used to use much, much, much safer pressurized light water cooled and moderated thermal reactors. Use of these plutonium producing sodium-cooled fast reactors is way, way, way too dangerous for any vulnerable area on earth. We need immediate international control of any and all significant reactor meltdown risk situations; Japan has proved States will gamble (and lose) Worldwide environmental health in the selfish hopes of saving some repair costs. The present meltdown of all three cores was completely avoidable ! Those criminals gambled our children’s health away to save Yen :

Question

What are the good reactors in use now, if there are any?

Response

Tim Rude I’ve learned that i have grown out of touch since my reactor operator days (go figure), but i doubt there’s any nuclear reactor type that is safer than the pressurized light water cooled and moderated thermal nuclear reactor (for several physics reasons). I’m sure those much safer reactors are presently in use. Those reactors do not transmute fertile material into more fuel however, and that’s why they have gone to the much, much, much more dangerous sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) type reactors (SFRs make valuable plutonium fuel as a byproduct). SFRs should certainly never be located in vulnerable places. If they don’t have a very safe, sparsely populated, geologically stable, flood and tsunami proof area, they should be required to use the much safer pressurized light water cooled and moderated thermal nuclear reactors (unless there’s something better, which i doubt). I am amazed at the stupidity building those SFRs at Fukushima. I am also amazed at the stupidity of locating the emergency cooling pumps in a location where they could be (and were) flooded and rendered inoperative by seawater; kids can understand how stupid that is.