How Does an RBMK Reactor Explode

[Black Aeronaut]

Lithuania was happy with it. Ignalina's two reactors produced enough power to send two Deloreans back to 1955 every operating second, with enough to spare to keep the local town's lights on.

*blink* *blinK* *blink*

So, 2.42Gigawatts, PLUS the local load????

*sigh*

And to think, the NIMBYs never seem to understand why the proponents of nuclear power push so hard.  This is the real benefit of nuclear power - the sheer ridiculous energy density.

Nuclear reactors can be so powerful that you can keep them all in a centralized location - safe from harming any established community* - and transmit power over incredibly long distances through an alternate means such as superconducting power lines... which can be cryogenically cooled with hydrogen from a cracking plant fired by the reactors.  Hey!  That's TWO energy mediums in ONE piece of infrastructure!  How awesome is that?

* For a given value - there will be at least one community close at hand to such a reactor complex, and that will be solely dedicated to the people that work in this complex.  Of which there would be a fair number.

It also helps if you build containment buildings the way we do here in America.  Make no mistake: even if it was only a "partial meltdown", Three Mile Island was pretty much the worst-case scenario for a boiling-water reactor - what really sets it apart from Fukushima and Chernobyl is the American fixation on The Worst Case Scenario... So we build our reactor containment buildings so strong that you'd need an actual bunker-buster bomb to breach one.  Thus, TMI #2 was contained, and the only danger was a small radiation leak from the stuck relief valve as it vented steam laced with radioactive noble gasses into the air.  (To put it into perspective, people in Denver, CO get a higher dose from being out in the sun.)