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The upside of Chernobyl

Page history last edited by Andrew Alder 3 years, 4 months ago Saved with comment

A page of energy issues

 

The Chernobyl_disaster was a disaster. There is no reason to celebrate it, or the Three_Mile_Island_accident, which was also a disaster although it didn't hurt anybody directly.

 

But it did have its upside.

 

The Soviets announced the design of the RBMK in the 1950s. My father was there.

 

It was at an international conference, I'm fairly but not completely sure it was the World Power Conference of 1956, in Vienna.

 

Questions were invited. The Australian delegation had the second right of reply, but the French came first. They asked "Surely this would have a positive power and void coefficient?"

 

That was the question every nuclear engineer (my father had just qualified) in the room was asking. The combination of water coolant, graphite moderator, and natural Uranium fuel was obviously very attractive, particularly in the days that Uranium enrichment was expensive and the techniques jealously guarded. But it was believed to be inherently unstable.

 

The reply was "Yes, and we are aware that in the West this would be considered an unsafe design. But our safety and control systems are so far in advance of anything the West will ever develop that in our hands, this is a safe design.":

 

A whole generation  of Soviet engineers were trained to believe that the RBMK was a triumph of "superior" Soviet technology.

 

So the bang when Chernobyl #4 exploded in exactly the way that those who considered the design unsafe had feared resonated through the Soviet technical leadership at all levels, and the contribution towards the downfall of the Soviet system is often underestimated in my opinion.

 

But strangely, it has yet to resonate in Western environmental circles. The anti-nuclear "experts" have been telling us for many years, before and after the Chernobyl explosion, how unsafe they consider Western reactors to be. But prior to the explosion, they breathed not a word of criticism of the RBMK.

 

They similarly breathed not a word of criticism of any particular design. The BWR (Fukushima) has no secondary coolant circuit. Had Three Mile Island been a BWR, the accident there would have released a great deal more radioactive material.

 

See also

 

 

More to follow 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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