OT: Rolls Royce on track to deliver SMR

The kit to stop them working there was a chart recorder, at the opposite end of the control room, no actual hard-wired safety system.

And that operating region would not have been a problem, except for the physical reactor design, which was known to be defective.

Yes, the rods could not be inserted fast enough, so as they started to go in, they slowed enough neutrons to the speeds required for a sustained reaction and increased output, just when they had nowhere to get rid of the heat. That did, as you say, result in distortion that prevented them being pushed fully in and stopping the reaction.

Again a known problem with the design, that the Soviets simply ignored.

The British AGR has 3 emergency shutdown stages, the last one is not recoverable.

Art Students to Nuclear Engineer: "OK, smart guy, /you/ tell /us/ what colour it should be!"

You've been reading Douglas Adams.

I'm not sure it matters where they exist re the risk to potentially everyone in the world?

Cheers, T i m

Somewhat far-seeing, wasn't he!

"Oh, stick it up your nose"

"That's just it, do we need SMR that can be inserted nasally"

On 17 Feb 2021 16:40:11 GMT, Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net wrote: <snip>

This is the funny thing about left brainers, they can't ever have 'what if' in their thinking. If it's never happened or has happened and killed a bunch of people, as long as it's not them personally (I'm not even sure if it would extend to their closest family?), everything is ok (with / by them). ;-(

Except reactors 'built to generate electricity' *have* gone wrong or been broken and have spewed very long living pollution across the world.

Relying on humans (human error) or automation (black Friday) to have total control of something very dangerous is a bad thing, and why I'm guessing it takes two keys and the presence of some important people to launch a nuke (not that Trump being involved makes that any less safe for the rest of us).

Cheers, T i m

Excellent, a simple and unobtrusive way to keep your nose warm on a winter's day!

No-one will notice and if they do, I'll just wrap a towel over my eyes and no-one will see me.

I was not saying that there was no risk outside the Ukraine, but that the West would not build such dangerous reactors, so it is irrelevant as an example of the dangers and possible reasons not to build reactors in the West.

Except of course that nuclear power plants have the normal, programmable (and therefore fallible and hackable - despite being locked down) control systems backed up (for the critical safety systems) by multiple, dedicated, hard-wired safety systems, which in turn are backed up by fail-safe mechanical systems. And the designs, calculations and permutations are pored over by the Nuclear, Process, Mechanical and Control Engineers that do the designs, the Safety Engineers that oversee the documenting of the safety systems, their equivalents in multiple companies working on the project and finally the Office for Nuclear Regulation.

Safety has moved on massively from the early days where people could operate the wrong valve.

This is like me saying, I'm going to walk down the road, and you saying, What if your legs fall off. Well, legs don't fall off *for* *no* *reason*. Just as reactors don't explode *for* *no* *reason*.

Put forward a *reason* why a reactor might explode or yer legs might fall off, and no doubt someone will comment.

FACT: no reactor has ever exploded *for* *no* *reason*. Actually, some here have said that no reactor has ever exploded. I wouldn't perhaps go quite that far in regard to Chernobyl, even if it was a steam and not a nuclear explosion. Large amounts of energy were released in a small amount of time, and the effect that has is a good definition of an explosion.

All right : No reactor has ever suffered a *nuclear* explosion...nor ever will...

Well you have to spell it out in words of one syllable for some who would otherwise mistake the overheard fart made by a plant operator for a nuclear explosion.

In so many ways.

Adrian

Your knowledge of nuclear physics is matched by your knowledge of veganism.

He is still not getting it, I observe. I await with interest his reasons as to why such an SMR might "blow-up" or otherwise be a danger.

You might as well worry about those garage-sized transformers you see dotted around on housing estates, in an enclosure with warning-of-death notices on them. Quite a bit of power constantly passes through them. If that power stopped passing through and instead was dumped into it, the transformer will explode. See examples on YouTube.

Occasionally taking out a scrote or two who was trying to nick the metal.

He is also still wittering on about 'consequences...for many years to come'

That is also ignorance. The only consequences are man made ones borne out of politics and panic, Meltdown in a secondarily contained PWR that properly vents hydrogen that may or may not be produced is a non-event environmentally.

you end up with a concrete structure that contains a wrecked reactor. leave it 20-30 years and its just a safe lump of concrete that contains a wrecked reactor

As I pointed out, Chernobyl reactors adjacent to the one that caught fire carried on for many years afterwards, it cannot have been that radioactive even there, and there have been no marked issues in the exclusion zone. None of the people who decided to stay had any gross effects on their health noted

As with any art student, his response - as with his veganism - is based on emotions that he considers represent a valid interpretation of reality.

In short he is *scared* of nuclear power, and is attempting to rationalise that fear into what he can then propose as a rational response, rather than looking into why he is afraid in the first place.

As with most people who have been duped by emotional narratives in the media and elsewhere, he is in complete denial of the fact that this has actually taken place.