Both underwater and underground deployment of nuclear plants is ideal for certain types of nuclear designs that are totally passively controlled. This design is old and venerable. Being greatly concerned about nuclear safety, the last paper that Dr. Edward Teller (designed the H bomb) wrote before his death recommended this design.
Also being greatly concerned about nuclear safety, the designer of the light water reactor also fought for this design and was fired for pushing too hard. Light water reactors are good at producing Pu239 which was important in those days at the begining of the cold war. These designs behave like a nuclear battery. In such a design, the core supplies heat as required. The heat output of the design is load leveled. The laws of nature regulate the nuclear reaction automatically and without the possibility of error. If no heat is extracted then the plant goes subcritical and dormant. The core is the only part of the reactor that is below the sea. Reactor automated core control and the power plant is on a surface barge or platform that can be unmoored and remove to port if required to avoid a strong hurricane. The core would remain underwater in a dormant shutdown state. Delayed heat remove from the core is enabled using a chimney effect where heated water would rise to the surface through a large pipe. The surface turbo-generator rejects heat into the ocean surface and joins the prevailing ocean current flow. Reactor refueling is simple and can be done automatically and waste processing is integral to the reactor design were 99% of the nuclear fuel is consumed. The underwater deployment is highly resistant to terrorism since the core is maintained in a hot cell supported by robots. The core is deployed at a 100 meters depth and can withstand any natural disaster (earthquake and associated wave generation) or the crash of any sized plain no matter the size. Using water as a structural material will greatly reduce the size of the plant minimizing the cost of structural material to a small fraction of the size and cost of current reactors. Such a plant is unlikely to be built because of a lack of heart and incipient fear from many quarters. Too bad the advice of the great men in American science was ignored for political reasons… Regards: axil On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:33 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Sun, 1 Apr 2012 23:17:19 -0400: > Hi, > [snip] > >I think the problem can be addressed by putting emergency generators far > >above the waterline, perhaps in the second story of the reactor building. > > I suggest building the entire reactor on the sea floor off shore. That way > there > would never be a shortage of cooling water, even if all electrical systems > failed completely and permanently, provided of course that the design used > gravity feed for the cooling water. If the reactor was far enough off > shore, and > deep enough, then tsunamis would go right over it, making little impact. > > Regards, > > Robin van Spaandonk > > http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html > >
