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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (568883)	5/30/2010 12:06:01 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578294

"Meltdown, how about Chernobyl?" Chernobyl was a totally different kind of reactor. To slow the neutrons enough so they can cause fission reactions instead of just making the reactor more radioactive, what is called a moderator is used. For pressurized light water reactors, the primary moderator is a water-boron salt mixture. The boron interacts with the neutrons, slowing the neutrons down and heating the water. The Soviets took a much cheaper route, like they did with much of their technology. They used a graphite pile to moderate the neutrons. Our first reactor was a graphite pile, it consisted of stacks of graphite blocks interspersed with uranium enriched blocks. No closed loops of pressurized, corrosive water solutions, no pumps, no complicated controls, etc. The downside? The graphite gets extremely hot, like more than a thousand degrees hot. When hot carbon is combined with oxygen, you get a very hot, hard to control fire. Which is why we dropped graphite pile for other technologies as soon as we could. Now, Chernobyl is a perfect example of how determined idiots can overcome any safeguards. Although, in fairness, the safeguards were not all that extensive, greasing the path to destruction. They were experimenting with the reactor to boost output. And boost it they did, to the point it started to runaway and broke containment. That exposed the hot graphite to the air and... That bit of idiocy can't have the same effect in the West. Our worst case scenario is a meltdown that breaks confinement. The closest we came was at 3 Mile Island, and that only because the operators did precisely the wrong thing for most of a shift. When the relief operators showed up, they saw what was happening, they followed their training and the disaster was averted. Now, no doubt, the safeguards have been improved since then. If nothing else, they likely have computerized the systems so that the operators get alerted when they try to do boneheaded things. Which isn't to say that things are risk-free, they aren't. But I am no more going to hide under my bed in fear of these risks than I am going to over the possibility of terrorism. The odds are pretty low if procedure is followed. It isn't zero, but the cost benefit ratio is well in the plus territory for both. Something good can still come out of this. One, maybe it can bring the one company with the absolute worse track record in safety on offshore drilling(literally hundreds of thousands times worse than the others) to heel. And maybe, just maybe, this will give some push for alternatives. Me, I'd like to see Polywell get a couple of hundred million for a full scale test reactor.