Kudos to Bluemage. I just wish that everyone would pull their heads out of their asses regarding nuclear power. Like he said, most reactors are nearly or over forty years old, and then they were built so freakishly tough that even a full-blown meltdown was contained.
Yeah, don't let anyone fool you - Three Mile Island was indeed as complete of a meltdown as they come. What made it nowhere nearly as bad as it could have been was the stupidly-tough leaded-concrete containment building. The entire reactor could have been slagged and it still would have been contained. If they had these containment structures at Chernobyl and Fukushima then those disasters would never have been quite as disastrous. (Yes, there would have been meltdowns still, but the important part is that they would have been contained.)
There are all kinds of new and different ideas - things that have already been proven and things that might be effective but just need a little more practical work. One of these is pebble bed reactors. The great fear here is the neutron medium, pyrolitic graphite, my catch fire if the fuel pebble's protective coating is breached. The only time this ever happened with a test reactor was while the fuel pebble was actually being handled. Pretty sure that improved procedures can make this a non-issue.
The nice thing about PBR's is their nifty little inherent safety feature: the hotter they get, the slower they burn - to the point where if there was a catastrophic loss of coolant then the reaction in the PBR pretty much stagnates. Cycle the coolant through as quickly as you can dissipate the heat and you can get a hell of an output from these things. Oh, and they're gas cooled, too, so you can use a noble gas that carries no residual radiation with it if it does escape.
And that's just one idea of many.
Yeah, don't let anyone fool you - Three Mile Island was indeed as complete of a meltdown as they come. What made it nowhere nearly as bad as it could have been was the stupidly-tough leaded-concrete containment building. The entire reactor could have been slagged and it still would have been contained. If they had these containment structures at Chernobyl and Fukushima then those disasters would never have been quite as disastrous. (Yes, there would have been meltdowns still, but the important part is that they would have been contained.)
There are all kinds of new and different ideas - things that have already been proven and things that might be effective but just need a little more practical work. One of these is pebble bed reactors. The great fear here is the neutron medium, pyrolitic graphite, my catch fire if the fuel pebble's protective coating is breached. The only time this ever happened with a test reactor was while the fuel pebble was actually being handled. Pretty sure that improved procedures can make this a non-issue.
The nice thing about PBR's is their nifty little inherent safety feature: the hotter they get, the slower they burn - to the point where if there was a catastrophic loss of coolant then the reaction in the PBR pretty much stagnates. Cycle the coolant through as quickly as you can dissipate the heat and you can get a hell of an output from these things. Oh, and they're gas cooled, too, so you can use a noble gas that carries no residual radiation with it if it does escape.
And that's just one idea of many.