Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

The U.S. Navy also built a submarine with a sodium cooled submarine reactor (Seawolf) . In practice it too was a failure and for similar reasons. There are a number of prototype (mostly in laboratories ) alternate reactor designs out there , mostly involving molten salt cooling systems in various breeder reactors, some involving Thorium as a source material for fissile U-233. All are very far from large scale practical application.

The essential fact here is that we have, over the past 50 years only episodic experience with such reactors, but ample, continuous experience with water cooled reactors, some boiling water reactors (BWRs) with a single heat exchange circuit and (many more) Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) with two heat exchange circuits. In practice the PWRs have proved to be simpler to build and more reliable and efficient in operation, and to have an unmatched safety record in the world of electrical power generation. Unlike the prototype reactor designs they are proven and ready now for large scale construction and development. The latest advanced PWR design incorporates new safety features to deal with emergency cooling issues such as those encountered at Fukushima ( though, even there, some fundamental but preventable design errors in siting the Fukushima reactors on an ocean shoreline directly facing the most geologically unstable region on the earth and in locating its emergency cooling systems on the shoreline were the main source of its vulnerability. Even so, no one died in the Fukushima reactor accident, while over 12 thousand lost their lives in the naturally occurring tsunami incident that caused it).

PWR technology is proven and available now. The plants in operation now produce power at a lower unit cost than do coal plants. Our government has designed a permitting system for them expressly designed to maximize the uncertainty and financial risk in their construction ,effectively preventing new plant construction. Environmentalists worldwide tend to oppose their construction using analogous means.

Interesting. Imagine 'sailing' these things, "20,000 leagues under the sea with my roomate the nuclear reactor"...

Who says no one died from the fukushima nuclear accident. And the nuclear accident was man made while the tsunami was a natural event. One we couldent do anything about the other could have been prevented with the proper planning.And the results of nuclear events can't be evedenced for hundreds of years. Its possible that more people will have died from the nuclear event over time.

I disagree with your characterization "greater than".

They have risks, yes, just like light water reactors have risks.

But just like the risks posed by light water reactors, those risks can be reasonably managed.

If your biggest concern is preventing accidents, the prismatic core variants of those high-temperature carbon-moderated reactors are 100% safe. The only downside is that TRISO pellets can't be reprocessed, so the reactors produce long-lived nuclear waste.



Eliminating long-lived nuclear waste is a worthy goal.

It's a shame the technology produces long-lived nuclear waste. What's the half life of those neptunium isotopes again?

The Government of Japan.

In addition they reported that the most exposed worker at the plant got a dose of less than 2 rem or 20 msv: that's less than one gets from a routine cat scan of his torso, an event with no confirmed adverse post effects. Post event radiation levels in the Fukushima area are well known and understood. There will be some property use restrictions f0r a couple of decades. That's about it.

The Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in PA about 40 years ago yielded zero measurable short or long term effects on public welfare.

It does indeed, though the storage of it is a readily solvable engineering problem. Higher enrichment of the nuclear fuel, and reprocessing of it after use, to yield more fuel would very significantly reduce the amount of high level waste.

My preference is to just consume all of the actinides in a sodium-cooled reactor so we don't have to worry about storing them for millions of years.

Unless there is somehow no contamination from cesium and strontium, I'd suggest property use restrictions for centuries, not decades.

A reasonable approach, but one that would require that we get back into the fuel reprocessing game that Pres. Jimmy Carter had outlawed decades ago. I'm all for doing it, both for that purpose, and the recovery of useful fissile material in our spent fuel. Transitioning now to higher enrichment level fuels for commercial reactors ( say to about 15% U 235) would be a good place to start.

Much more likely they will remove & replace the top layer of soil - down to about 1M & store the waste in a repository. My company recently completed a similar removal of asbestos contaminated soil (and from an inhabited residential area) removing and replacing enough soil to empty & fill a football field (with end zones) to a depth of ~ 180 ft. Removal/replacement cost was about $16M.

That would work. I didn't think of that.

remember jackrabbit flat.It wasnt deep but it was wide. As well as Sedan site. I was doing some isotope mapping work for SAIC when they were doing the investigtions for alpha contam soils at NTS. (mid 90's?)
Like at 3 mile island where the contaminated fluids were processed and then "boiled down" so they could send it to INL forever along with solids and subsoils .

As far as NO effects at 3 mi., whil you are probably right, remember, that over 350 health effects lawsuits were settled out of court with sttlement info sealed from public scrutiny. Met Ed was just too quick to cave on them, They didnt even make EIL insurance claims an I always wondered about that. I feel there was something they didnt want anyone to know. (maybe Im getting like these "truthers" )
3 mi island was a relatively easy response "melt down" it was handleable and our tech in handling enviro effects in Pressurizzed reactors prevented a Chrnobyl like event. Had it been an alkali cooled system it would have been a real mess cause' the aquifers under the area are highly anisotropic fracture flow systems with heads seismically measurable for nearly ten miles . Had it not been handled smartly as it was eventually (after the panic settled down and the engineers were allowed to work) The nearby town of Elizabethtown woulda been our own ghost town.
No matter how smart we think we are, occasionally we get damned lucky .Why Fukushima Daiichi was even locatd where it was is a mystery to me.

What was that reactor incident in 1959 at a alkali coolant system , near LA?

Thyre till screwin with that one.

I'm not familiar with the LA event in 1959 which you describe, but I do know of several mishaps involving prototype, specialized reactors. Perhaps the most notorious was that of an Army/Argonne Lab low power reactor intended as a power source for remote sites. at the Idaho Laboratory site (INEL) in the late 1950s. ( While going through Navy prototype reactor training there I used to derive by the remote fenced site, enroute between the Navy site and Idaho Falls.) As I recall in restarting the small reactor after a maintenance shutdown a control rod was pulled too far out during a manual retraction to align it with the others. A prompt criticality and explosion resulted, killing two Army operators and contaminating a fairly large area.

The Russian government said for years that their nuclear event dident do any damage till rabbits started growing three tails. Governments cover their asses so as I said wait 20 or 30 years to see long time damage.

The past events were in Na cooled reactors. We learned that first order Cs daughters gave us radio barium which was the first Gamma emitter. The half life isonly a month or so but new technology for tracking GW contamination made it imperative that the breakdown hains (no matter what path) become known in detail so e'd quickly learn to monitor "Plumes" in air, GW , the soil.

My only experience with U235 was working with nuclear weapons in the Air Force. During the beginning, we had to man-handle the U235 capsule enclosed in lead that we inserted into the bomb. After over one year, we no longer had to man-handle those capsules. We also handled thermonuclear weapons. We loaded nukes on B36's, B47's, and B52's. I'm surprised to see those B52's still flying. I was in the Air Force from 1955 to 1959, and in the beginning, worked with the same bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The irony being, my ancestors are from Hiroshima, and I never saw another Asian working in my specialty. The advance in nuclear weapons was amazing during the four years I was in the Air Force. The advance in weaponry no longer resembles what I was familiar with in the late 1950's.

That was a good safety measure. Not having the U-235 (or Pu-239) capsule inserted into it meant no nuclear explosion if the bomb was accidentally dropped.

Unfortunately the tighter design tolerances beginning with the second generation of thermonuclear bombs made it necessary to forego this safety measure.

On two different occasions we almost nuked ourselves in bomber crashes. Then we changed our policy to leave our bombers sitting on the runway ready to take off instead of having some of them airborne all of the time.

The two crashes (one in North Carolina (I believe) the other in Spain were indeed expensive and upsetting events, but neither came close to a nuclear detonation as a result of features built into the fusing design of which I expect you have some awareness. The main factor behind our cessation of continuous airborne nuclear alerts was the deployment of land and submarine based missile launchers with equivalent response times.

One was North Carolina. I got the impression that our other close call was in Texas, but I have never been able to get any details of that one.

There were four safety measures on the bombs in question.


One, there was a pin that had to be pulled out of the bomb (sort of like pulling the pin from a grenade). This pin was attached to a rope that went up to the pilot so he could pull the pin from the cockpit. I assume that the theory was that if the bomb fell unintentionally, the rope would go with the bomb and the pin would not be pulled.

But when the plane broke apart, the rope snagged, and when the bomb fell from the plane, the pin was pulled.


Two, there was a heavy strip that also needed to be pulled from the bomb. One end of the strip was attached to the bomber, and it would be pulled from the bomb as it fell from the plane. This seems to have been designed to ensure that the bombs could not be set off (either intentionally or accidentally) while the bomb was on the ground.

When the bomb fell from the plane as the plane broke apart, this strip was pulled too.


Three, the bomb had to detect air rushing by it at high speed as it fell. Presumably this was another measure to protect against the bombs being set off on the ground.

Needless to say, after the bomb fell from the plane, it detected air rushing past it at the required speed.


Four, an electric current had to be applied to the bombs for 30 seconds in order to arm them. This current was supposed to be only available if both the pilot and the bombardier (located in different parts of the plane) held down a switch simultaneously. However, there were wiring shorts in some of the bombers, and there had been a number of cases where bombs had received the requisite current unintentionally.

In this case, the wiring was sound, and the bomb had not received the 30 seconds of current.

But, had this been one of those cases where faulty wiring had inadvertently supplied bombs with current: BOOM!