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The Basement
Attempting to bring clarity to the nuclear problems facing Japan
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<blockquote data-quote="Phil Graham" data-source="post: 24157" data-attributes="member: 430"><p>Re: Attempting to bring clarity to the nuclear problems facing Japan</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The Cooling towers and turbines play essentially no role in the containment of a nuclear accident, they are some of the first things cut off from the reactor. Also the pressures inside a nuclear reactor a far too high to inject water merely by the force of gravity-induced head pressure.</p><p></p><p>A passive system would look like (and I am sure I am oversimplifying) a mixture of natural convection inside the reactor vessel, coupled with pumps driven by the reactor steam to cool the reactor in an internal circulating loop, then this internal circulating loop water would be passively cooled with something like a gravity-fed water source.</p><p></p><p>Fluid flow is a complex problem, and the simulation of the convection behaviors inside of a reactor was beyond the slide-rules of the engineers who designed most of the current nuclear reactors. The next generation will fare better.</p><p></p><p><em>In my opinion, perhaps the biggest problem with current nuclear technology is the generating scale is simply too large</em>. The dog has a massive tail to wag it. There are many small reactor designs on the drawing boards that could provide power to a local area, have excellent passive safety behavior, and would have manageable heat fluxes in the case of a thousand year incident.</p><p></p><p>Hitachi, Toshiba, Hyperion Power, and other are working on designs that produced less than 50MW of electricity, are buried in deep in the ground, and make more sense, at least to me.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Phil Graham, post: 24157, member: 430"] Re: Attempting to bring clarity to the nuclear problems facing Japan The Cooling towers and turbines play essentially no role in the containment of a nuclear accident, they are some of the first things cut off from the reactor. Also the pressures inside a nuclear reactor a far too high to inject water merely by the force of gravity-induced head pressure. A passive system would look like (and I am sure I am oversimplifying) a mixture of natural convection inside the reactor vessel, coupled with pumps driven by the reactor steam to cool the reactor in an internal circulating loop, then this internal circulating loop water would be passively cooled with something like a gravity-fed water source. Fluid flow is a complex problem, and the simulation of the convection behaviors inside of a reactor was beyond the slide-rules of the engineers who designed most of the current nuclear reactors. The next generation will fare better. [I]In my opinion, perhaps the biggest problem with current nuclear technology is the generating scale is simply too large[/I]. The dog has a massive tail to wag it. There are many small reactor designs on the drawing boards that could provide power to a local area, have excellent passive safety behavior, and would have manageable heat fluxes in the case of a thousand year incident. Hitachi, Toshiba, Hyperion Power, and other are working on designs that produced less than 50MW of electricity, are buried in deep in the ground, and make more sense, at least to me. [/QUOTE]
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