 | Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream | The Oil Drum | A Simple Oil Production Estimate for 2007 |  |
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| Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream | The Oil Drum | A Simple Oil Production Estimate for 2007 | |
k Nation (Jim Kunstler)
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An ex-Iron Curtain nuclear engineer once told me that our CANDU plants are of a terrible design - no different than what was used in Chernobyl.
If he was a nuclear engineer, Chernobyl was no surprise.
CANDU's are good designs that are stable, with full containment domes. They have negative void coefficients, excellent neutron economy, and can be run on natural uranium fuel.
The old RBMK however had a positive void coefficient. The advantage of the RBMK was you didn't have to do any isotope separation to run on natural uranium fuel, but it was unstable. In addition, it was an excercise in everything to do wrong when constructing a reactor. No containment vessel, scram rods that make the core explode, graphite tips on the control rods that increase the reactivity when they're first inserted into the core untill the neutron poison is all the way in. It could only be marginally worse designed if they mandated sticking a giant tank of nerve gas on the roof.
LOL