From a safety standpoint, the design could be likened to running mechanical brakes on an Indy car. Even so, it's safe at some operating load. Chernobyl, to repeat, was operating at 120%. That's Doom, just waiting.
I did a report on Chernobyl when I was in HS. They were not only running at 120%, they also disabled a number of safety systems for a test, then their backup generators wouldnt start up, they failed to initiate a SCRAM when they were supposed to for political reasons. Oh yeah, and a little quirk where when control rods were inserted the reaction would go up before it went down. The list goes on. Hanford was probably a safer design.
Can there be some minor, short-term radiation problem with modern designs? Yes. Can there be a Chernobyl-type disaster? For all practical purposes, no. That is, it might be somehow possible, but nobody knows how it could happen. When a "pile" overheats, it melts; it does not repeat Hiroshima. Had Chernobyl had a containment building around the reactor system, the chemical explosion could not have blasted radioactive material across the countryside.
Bingo, worst case scenario (explosive reactor core breach), short circuited by a pre-built massive concrete and steel containment building. You might end up burying the dome for a couple hundred years before cleaning it up, but unlike many chemical contaminants, radioactive materials get less dangerous over time.
Chernobyl was the prototypical "dirty bomb" that is commonly talked about as a terrorist's weapon. It was not a nuclear explosion.
True, the explosion was a steam/pressure release, explosive decompression once the reactor container was breached. Much of the core is still intact down in a sub-basement. They have some pictures of it, very grainy. The radiation is so intense down there they had to use special film.
Hey, Firethorn, even the little 10-watt-thermal reactor at Gatorland had a Scram button.
Is it big and red? Its not a proper SCRAM button if its not big and red. Oh yeah, and a protective clear plastic cover.
Though I was thinking about the fuse type emergency SCRAM system where when the temperature reaches a certain point the linkages holding the control rods melt, dropping them all into the reactor, stopping the reaction. Of course, at that point the plants going to be down for a year, but it didnt melt down!
You've said that a "Chernobyl-type accident" isn't possible here.
Youre misrepresenting us again. For all practical purposes, no, pretty much zilch doesnt say that it isnt possible, just that the odds are vanishingly remote. IE extremely low. Thats not to say that it couldnt happen, just that extremely unusual events would have to happen such as an asteroid strike.
I can only assume that that means an uncontrolled reaction with core breach and atmospheric exposure.
Id remove the uncontrolled reaction, though thats generally part of it.
If you claim that that's not possible, it goes to follow that nuclear power has achieved perfection. Or at least the American iteration of it has.
Youre trying to knock down a strawman here again. We dont say that its not possible, we dont say that accidents dont happen, that mistakes arent made. What we do say is that nuclear power has achieved one of the safest power generation records in the world. Per kWh, nuclear power does the least amount of environmental damage and kills the fewest people of any major electrical power generation system. Its so low that deaths from falls from maintaining wind farms and accidents while maintaining solar panels might exceed those of the nuclear industry, even including Chernobyl.
Nuclear power's greatest failing isn't the technology; it's the atom chimps who control the technology. As long as the technology depends on the atom chimps, it will be a disaster waiting to happen.
When did the atom chimps get control? I mean, weve had pretty much the same record for the last 30 years: no deaths from radiation (weve lost a few due to steam accidents, which also happen in coal plants) and few injuries. For chimps they seem to be doing pretty good. Weve had more radiation caused deaths from malfunctioning medical devices.