--- On Wed, 5/1/13, Sebastian Kuzminsky <s...@highlab.com> wrote: > Different fusion reactions have different end products, and > it's only > the neutral particles that irradiate the containment > vessel. Any fusion > end products that carry an electrical charge will be > confined by the > magnetic containment field, along with the plasma that makes > up the fusion fuel. > > There are aneutronic fusion reactions which in theory can be > made > completely clean. (Avoiding unwanted side reactions is > left as an exercise for the reader.)
Science fiction, particularly movies, bears much of the blame for misconceptions about the safety of nuclear power. So far there have been a grand total of THREE incidents where there have been explosions at nuclear reactors. The first was the SL1 in 1961 at the INEL research facility in Idaho. That was due to a design problem which caused an accidental instant runaway. It wasn't a power plant, that was where R&D was done for the US Navy's ship and submarine reactors. The second was at Chernobyl in 1986. That was due to shoddy Communist construction, based on obsolete American research reactor plans they'd stolen and scaled up. The third was in 2011 at the Fukushima plant in Japan. AFAIK the reactors themselves didn't explode, the explosions were from water decomposing into hydrogen and oxygen from the high temperatures of the overheating cores when their cooling systems shut down. The cause was the completely unforeseeable event of a massive wave flooding the backup generators, and the anti-nuclear "greens" blocking any updating and upgrading of anything, including safety systems. There's a reason why the control rooms there looked like they were 40 years old, because they were 40 years old. Note I didn't mention 1979, Three Mile Island. The containment systems worked. Only a small amount of radioactive steam was released. Why its problems went on as long as they did was because the light indicating a valve/vent was open was on the opposite side of the room from where all the operators were gathered, trying to figure out why the core temp kept rising despite flooding it with water. When one noticed the light and hit the control to manually close the valve, the problem was over but the core was badly damaged. There was no explosion. Modern control systems where everything is on monitors where operators don't have to constantly circle a room with indicators, gauges and controls encrusting all the walls would prevent such incidents. Any problem would pop up as an alert right in front of their eyes. Buuuut, the nuclear plants can't install such upgrades. No nuclear plants have been built in the USA for 34 years, they're all running on technology that old or older. As for fusion power, nobody has yet operated a sustained fusion reaction, let alone managed to extract any useful electricity. Getting the thing to work is the hard part. Getting one to go KRAKABOOM (as Hollywood and many authors love to do) will be dang near impossible. Cut the fuel feed and it shuts down instantly. Containment failure? Shuts down instantly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
