Chernobyl

[Slick]

Again, no offense intended. I decided to provide the link because I have had much training on what happened at Chernobyl since I operate and test reactors for a living, I decided to squash some urban legends.

The "faulty" design is somewhat misleading. Their reactor design (and some of the designs in the US) are a boiling water reactor design. These are more difficult to control than other designs, but that does not make them faulty. They have been operating safely for many years. What the US considers "faulty" is that many other countries including the former Soviet Union don't believe in the idea of "containment". Containment buildings are built around all US reactors and are designed to keep a reactor design contained in all but the most severe circumstances. They are designed for earthquakes up to a certain magnitude and most were designed to survive an aircraft impact (at the time of design, but there have been bigger aircraft built since). They are also designed to contain any reactor accidents. Indeed, Three Mile Island containment worked perfectly. There was a minor release of some low level radioactive steam via a relief valve, but that was designed to relieve pressure outside of the containment. If Chernobyl had a containment building, there would be no contamination or radiation outside the building. That is what was faulty, but under Soviet economics, deemed too costly.

The "wrong coolant" idea is just an urban legend. Many operating reactors use light water with no problems.

As far as "military involvement", that's also mostly irrelevant. It's true that the military was very involved in many things in the former Soviet Union, but they did not contribute to the problem.

"Switching off failsafes". Let's talk about this one. They were testing a failsafe at the time. They were trying to ensure that, following a loss of power, the turbine generators would be able to provide enough electrical power until the standby generators came on. Making sure that the failsafes work is a very good thing. In order to do this, they had to temporarily disable other safety systems for the test. This is not necessarily a bad thing either. What made this one very, very bad, was that the operators were not trained very well and did not understand the effect on the plant. When the problem happened, there were ample opportunities for the operators to take action to correct the problem. They did not understand what was going on and through action and inaction did not do the right things to prevent an accident. They were poorly trained and asked to operate in a very abnormal condition. What compounded this was a sense of urgency to complete the test so they were rushing. This is the true tragedy - they weren't trained well enough to handle an abnormal situation so it got worse and lead to a reactor accident.

I can tell you that whenever problems (even small ones) occur on any reactor plant anywhere, investigations occur and the problems, causes and corrective action reports are disseminated to the nuclear community so that training on these problems can be done and any changes put in place to prevent similar occurrences. This may involve changing or upgrading plant components, modifying operating procedures or other processes to prevent the problem from happening again.

Fossil fuels won't be around forever. I am also involved with other "alternate energy sources". Hawaii is a unique place where solar, tidal, wind turbine, OTEC and geothermal sources all exist in one place. Fusion is looking more promising every day, but it is probably a generation away from producing power for commercial use. There are some other fancy designs being developed for long term space travel (ironic that we're discussing this on the SE4 forum) and other applications. These are probably a generation away from being practical as well.

Until then, people need to conserve energy and support alternate energy research. They also need to be a little more tolerant of nuclear plants until a better substitute can be used.

Slick.