RE: PG&E will shut off power for nearly 800,000 customers starting Wednesday
10-13-2019, 06:17 PM
10-13-2019, 06:17 PM
For that matter, Generation 4 nuclear reactors using fluoride salt based extremely high temperature liquid fuels or metal coolant in the primary (direct contact in the reactor) cooling loop would be vastly safer options compared to the current high pressure water or gas cooled reactors.
Because those things? Those are literal bombs the moment the containment vessel breaches, double digits atmospheric pressure at minimum gets quite violent when it can escape to a lower pressure environment, which is what happened in both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
While a salt reactor can't melt down (it's already molten and any sensible design will have a properly engineered tub to catch the highly radioactive salt when the drain plug is pulled) and a metal cooled reactor has insanely high maximum operating temperatures. The USA had a NaK alloy cooled test reactor, and with the right mixture of the alloy that's liquid at room temperature while the boiling temperature physically couldn't be reached even with every control rod removed and the cooling shut off. They tried that.
And all that while both salt reactors and metal cooled reactors operate at atmospheric pressure, so they don't explode into a contaminated mist that can wreck the containment building.
Labster, I'm with Dartz. You don't need a low seismicity location in California. You need a reactor and housing that can take an earthquake (a well understood science by now) and keep passive containment even when the cooling loop is lost. I mean, with that metal cooled reactor all you need to do is make sure that the metal coolant doesn't drain out of the reactor vessel. It may not do a whole lot of cooling as a result, but when the reactor throttles itself down as temperature rises that's not much of a problem, just stuff every control rod back in and let the reactor sit there and cool down over the following weeks as the reaction products decay.
Because those things? Those are literal bombs the moment the containment vessel breaches, double digits atmospheric pressure at minimum gets quite violent when it can escape to a lower pressure environment, which is what happened in both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
While a salt reactor can't melt down (it's already molten and any sensible design will have a properly engineered tub to catch the highly radioactive salt when the drain plug is pulled) and a metal cooled reactor has insanely high maximum operating temperatures. The USA had a NaK alloy cooled test reactor, and with the right mixture of the alloy that's liquid at room temperature while the boiling temperature physically couldn't be reached even with every control rod removed and the cooling shut off. They tried that.
And all that while both salt reactors and metal cooled reactors operate at atmospheric pressure, so they don't explode into a contaminated mist that can wreck the containment building.
Labster, I'm with Dartz. You don't need a low seismicity location in California. You need a reactor and housing that can take an earthquake (a well understood science by now) and keep passive containment even when the cooling loop is lost. I mean, with that metal cooled reactor all you need to do is make sure that the metal coolant doesn't drain out of the reactor vessel. It may not do a whole lot of cooling as a result, but when the reactor throttles itself down as temperature rises that's not much of a problem, just stuff every control rod back in and let the reactor sit there and cool down over the following weeks as the reaction products decay.