"Come on kids, let's go play in the abandoned nuclear power station"
El Reg takes a look around Dounreay, the world's first fast-breeder reactor undergoing decommissioning and decontamination.
An interesting read.
Not a bad read. I stood more or less where the guy is standing in the b/w photo under the caption Spotlight, but after the lid went on and the dummy fuel had been loaded. (It's PFR, and it is a construction photo, not a decommissioning one, despite the file name).
See this link for fuller and more correct technical details, including the naval submarine reactor site next door to the UKAEA one.
Why did it eventually close? Was it a political decision, were there technical problems, for example with all that thermally hot liquid NaK, or was it just that it had fulfilled its purpose?
We dropped in at Wylfa Visitors Centre last year. A very sad & depressing place.
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Because it's closing down, or because they're miserable bastards in general?
It's not far from where I live in UK, about an hour's drive. Worth the trip next time I'm at home, or not?
The former. (Closed now, IIRC. Dunno if the visitor centre's still open.)
I'd say not.
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Ta.
Wish I'd gone to Sellafield before they stopped the public tours. That was a few years ago.
Jim al-Khalili's Inside Sellafield is worth a watch.
The technology turns out to be comparatively expensive to engineer. The problem with PFR, for example, was to do with the nasty corrosive fluid (water) causing all sorts of problems with welds in the steam generator.
The original argument was that it was a particularly efficient way to use uranium: you can "breed" fissile material out of otherwise useless U238. The original calcs had a "payback" time of a few years, later and more realistic ones suggested you might just about get enough to fuel a new reactor after about 30 years.
There was at one time a reasonably serious "commercial fast reactor" programme with some international cooperation but the political climate turned against it. There are still a couple of "outposts", principally Russia, India and China (see Wikipedia).
There was a small criticality accident caused by spectacular incompetence in Japan (Tokai Mura 1999), in a facility where fuel for a small experimental fast breeder was being made.
That's a pretty good description, speaking as someone who has been inside a fair number of the buildings for work. No chance of it now, though.
To my mind the real jewel on the site was the Calder Hall reactors:
1950's technology, contemporary with the Vulcan bomber and just as impressive. Soon, all that will be left of the interesting engineering will be the photographs.ISTR having a few small niggles with that, but he's a good presenter.
We were lucky enough to do the visitors* tour back when the reactor was still operational (1990), it was quite something to be able to you were standing on top of a working reactor :) Was surprised using liquid sodium as a coolant didn't cause more problems.
*We had family in the local area, none worked at the plant though.
As long as you keep it away from air and water, it is actually quite benign even at high temperatures. It's a very good heat transfer medium, and the big thing over water, carbon dioxide, or helium is that you run it at close to atmospheric pressure, rather than 40 to 200 atmospheres. The fast reactor core is also very compact, because it needs no moderator. So they can run at very high power densities, and liquid metal coolant helps here.
Lead and bismuth are also good, perhaps surprisingly, because although they are very good at shielding gamma radiation they don't absorb neutrons too badly.
I think - and I may be wrong - that what happened was
1/. They proved they could breed plutonium fuel. 2/. We had more than enough plutonium anyway 3/. The cost of uranium was so low we didn't need to breed plutonium 4/. The reactor came to the end of its economic life.
What? I drove past there years ago and there wasn't any habitation for flipping MILES.
About the most desolate place in Scotland AFAIAC
Yes, does anyone remember the Soviet exhibition in London around that time? I had a book from there called The Peaceful Atom, with lots of Russian young ladies with silly elasticised hats moving about a lab of some sort and a caption that said, Beyond Fission, Fusion reactor only a decade away. Ahem.. Brian
Yes, we had a school trip to that exhibition. An enduring memory was just how drab everything was, all battleship grey, as if that was the only paint they had in Russia. Another memory was of one of their space capsules; looked as if it had been assembled with parts (pipes, valves etc) from a local plumbing and hardware shop.
Agreed.
PFR, the 250 MW plant which was intended as a scalable prototype for commercial plant had very low availability, less than 30%, mainly because of boiler design problems.
I quite enjoyed it. I remember a machine spitting out bolts about 8 mm diameter and 25 mm long. You could take away as many as you wanted, but they were too hot to touch for a while because of the forging process.
Oh it's definitely that! If you don't like crowded it's ideal, nice in the summer (apart from the midges) but it gets a touch cold in the winter :)
They lived in Thurso, as did a fair few from the plant, but yes 10 miles or so away. That counted as "local" for them, a "trip to town" counted as Inverness, about a 5 hour round trip :)
Not relevant in any way, but my uncle was a train driver for ScotRail at the time. Apart from fishing/farming or tourism related industries there weren't many too other forms of employment, apart from the Plant.
The most isolated spot on the coast was exactly what they were looking for.
An important thing to remember about experimental reactors is that they are experimental - and they might just react in a surprising way.
The whole nuclear industry was/is a false trail. It was all about nuclear weapons.
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