Jones, Yes, it is the case that reactors should be designed with more concern for safety. I understand that. I also agree that the soviet reactor design was poor, just as you say. Yet the fact remains that it took human hands to turn off the existing fail safe equipment, and destructively test the reactor. NO ENGINEERING DESIGN CAN WITHSTAND THE HUMAN HAND. All machines will fail in the end, because humans are smarter than machines and can think of utterly ingenious ways to break them.
The immediate cause of the accident is all I care about, frankly. Because that's what caused the accident. You seem to think we can defeat Godels Law and build a machine that is impossible to break. The rest of the reactors adjacent to the destroyed reactor have worked fine to this point, because no one has ( yet ) shut off all the safety overrides and tried to destructively test the reactor again. But it's a matter of time... Here's a more recent example. The last nuclear accident in Japan occurred when workers processed uranium fuel rods in a steel mop bucket!!! They put in enough material to reach critical mass, which caused a small explosion. Now perhaps Japanese mop buckets can be redesigned with a special radiation sensors that alerts the user when he's put too much uranium in the mop bucket for processing. Or better still, a lid which prevents the insertion of uranium fuel rods. All these things would help, as you say about the SU designed reactor. But what caused the accident? And how will all our careful designs help solve the problem? Don't you think the workers would have cut the wires to that annoying alarm they keep hearing when they load the bucket with uranium? Or unscrew the lid? What the hell are they doing processing uranium in a mop bucket!!! At what point do we admit PBKAC, as we say in the software industry, ( Problem Between Keyboard And Chair ). I'm all for nuclear power, it's a great source of energy. The problem is these pesky primates we have to rely on to run the plants. How do we redesign them for safety? Jones writes: >This fault goes straight back to the Soviet bureauracracy >and their lack of accountability for anything other than the >lowest-cost solution. That sounds exactly like what we have here. K. -----Original Message----- From: Jones Beene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 12:29 PM To: vortex Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power Keith, > Here the author implies that the Chernobyl accident was due to some major fault in the reactor design and implementation, carefully ignoring the fact that the real accident, as it occurred in the real world that you and I live in, was due to technicians shutting off all of the fail-safe systems and intentionally driving the reactor to failure. NO NO NO !!! Just to clear up one major point and continuation of a line of disinformation put out by the Soviets. The Chernobyl reactor design - and not the irresponsible acts of the employees - caused the accident. You are falling for the same bogus story put out by the Soviets to protect their other reactor assets - also flawed from day-one. And make no mistake, the "immediate cause" of the accident was worker stupidity but the accident was absolutely inevitable, given the flawed design (now changed). We were actually taught this in the 60s as part of a reactor design course. The US considered but rejected this design in the 50s (it is a cheaper design and needs far less enrichment the PWR). This Soviet design has a fatal flaw in that the coolant (light water) is NOT the moderator. The moderator - carbon - has far less thermal neutron cross-section than does the coolant, so in a loss-of-coolant accident, your reactivity goes way UP instead of down, and exponentially fast, it should be added. In all US designed reactors, loss-of-coolant shuts the reactor down because the coolant IS also the moderator: HUGE difference. We even told this the Soviets this back in the 60s in great detail - yet they persisted with a totally flawed design because it was cheap, plus they did not educate the workers well enough about the fatal consequences of loss-of-coolant. In a US reactor, this loss would shut the reactor down over time, as it did at TMI but in their flawed design, loss of coolant exponentially increases the reactivity of the core - and failure is guaranteed. This fault goes straight back to the Soviet bureauracracy and their lack of accountability for anything other than the lowest-cost solution- and not exactly to the workers themselves, however stupid their actions were (and they were *stupid* beyond all comprehension but yet that was not the ultimate problem). Jones
