On 03/10/2019 09:57 PM, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
On Sat, Mar 9, 2019 at 10:26 PM Gene Heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote:
Leave it to humans with no concept of common sense, but lots of don't
rock the boat
rules and you get TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. And probably 100 more
lessor 'accidents' we haven't been told about.
Gene, this is just not the case. There's no way that 'lesser nuclear
accidents' are covered up, unless you include people falling off ladders
and such.
Well, there HAVE been quite a few. No way near the
Chernobyl or Fukushima scale, but still serious. The US
Navy had a test reactor in Idaho that blew up in 1961, it
killed 3 operators.
It was also a reactor due for refueling, and so was really
sensitive to having control rods pulled out.
In 1966, a breeder reactor designed for commercial power
generation had a meltdown, and had to be decommisioned.
This was near Detroit.
There was a really serious accident at the Windscale plant,
a plutonium production reactor in the UK in 1957. They had
a hot spot in an air-cooled graphite pile reactor, and the
graphite caught fire. There was significant radiation release.
One with a good outcome was the Browns Ferry plant in
Alabama, in 1985. Inspectors were looking for air leaks
with CANDLES, and set packing around wires on fire, on an
operating reactor. The fire took out all the control
wiring, and the reactor ran for several HOURS with no active
control. But, US reactors are DESIGNED to be thermally
self-stable, so the reactor just kept running at steady
power. They ended up scramming the reactor by taking the
batteries out of the emergency lights in the control room
and poking wires into the indicator lamp sockets to command
the control rod drives to insert the rods. No damage other
than all the wiring burned up.
There have been several accidents in Japan and the US
involving processing of nuclear materials, not AT reactors,
where people either got radiation doses or were killed.
Jon
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