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A comment on Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval. Parent comment

Re:Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety ... by AngryData on Thursday September 03, 2020 @07:34PM (#24370069)
It also helps to not be running a reactor based on designs from the 1950s and then decades later ignore all the known potential problems.
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Re:Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety ... by _jal on Thursday September 03, 2020 @07:46PM (#24370163)
It does, but it makes sense to explore fail-safe designs.

Depending on a lack of incompetence in dangerous systems works until it doesn't. To the extent that these things can simply halt when incompetently managed, they should.

If anyone disagrees, I'd like to know why they think the next hundred years are going to be so much freer of political shortsightedness and corruption than the last hundred.

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Re:Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety ... by cameldrv on Thursday September 03, 2020 @08:36PM (#24370536)
Fukishima is a perfect example. Unit 1 had been retrofitted with an isolation condenser, which should have been able to prevent a meltdown even with no power, but it wasn't activated, for reasons that remain murky.
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Re:Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety ... by Gravityloss on Friday September 04, 2020 @04:33AM (#24372971)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_condensor

Sounds like a quite simple design indeed, and only one valve opening away from use?

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