Re:Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an...
by Retric on Monday August 05, 2013 @05:32PM
(#6163232)
Which just goes to show if a safety system can be disabled it might be disabled. Brick walls on the other hand are hard to turn off.
Re:Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an...
by ori_b on Monday August 05, 2013 @05:53PM
(#6163382)
That's exactly right, which is why you don't replace your crumple zones and roll cages (primary and secondary containment) with tin foil. That way, even if your brake lines are cut, you still have something protecting you.
Modern reactors are designed so that they will be passively safe. Even if the safety systems get shut down and the reactor core turns into a radioactive puddle of metal, it shouldn't be able to lose containment.
And yet, compared to any other design still in use, it had virtually no containment. It had a concrete and steel lid for primary containment, but it's secondary containment was a corrugated tin roof, instead of the typical reinforced concrete that can take a jet impact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM). On top of that, they disabled the safety systems deliberately because the reactor would normally not have allowed itself to be placed in the extremely unstable state that caused the disaster.
The Chernobyl accident can be compared to taking a car, replacing the crumple zones and roll cage with tin foil, cutting the brake lines, and then driving full speed into a wall in order to test the safety systems. Without using a crash test dummy. And then wondering why someone got hurt.
When people can do something as monumentally stupid and poorly engineered as Chernobyl and still keep most of the radioactive material contained, that really says something.