why don't we just use a boraxs reator?

a boraxs reator is a reator that is from 1800's it's was not high tech but it did not end with uraum or torum in stead it was boron yes boron it dose not make radashion in stead it make heat very fast mix boron with water and siver then you have heat the reachon can last for 3years...

That moment, you rediscover the CANDU reactor design lol

@atomicblender So why did you stop at the concrete floor in Fukushima? The corium is not on the concrete pad in the containment vessel...it has melted through to the wells below the containment vessel and is no longer contained. 400 tons of water per day leak into the basements where the corium is located, 130 tons per day is captured, leaving nearly 300 tons per day of untouched radioactive water streams into the Pacific Ocean every single day.

You are the most sensible youtuber in atomic energy hope ypur channel grows

It’s also not that complicated. You just basically put some naturally find mineral that doesn’t like each other and tends to heat things up when they’re too close together… really close together! The boiling part is not hard… the hard part is how to stop it from boiling water and not given people free chest X-ray every minute….

The best quote ever.

@tonamg53 To be fair the uranium mining and refining process is extremely complicated as well as resource intensive resulting in 50,000 tons a year of refined U238 (depleted uranium metal) as a byproct that requires high level storage eternally, and untold tons of tailings and other mining related pollution. Then come the reactors: the most complicated engineered devices created by man some would argue, not up for argument is that fact that PWR and BWR reactors cost billions and take over a decade to make, and the fact that all generated long term high level radioactive waste will be stored onsite in giant cooling pools (and some are dry casked) permanently. Not to mention that radiation degrades metal over time so theres all the associated problems with that. Other than all that its a modern scientific marvel that our descendendts will pay for all their lives as it directly is used to create nuclear weapons and Depleted Uranium Munitions and thats why superior technologies have not replaced standard fission reactors.

@@ProlificInvention Deaths from Fukushima accident: 1 ( due to evacuation and not related to radiation) Death from Chernobyl accident: UN estimate direct death at 50 and from radiation exposure over the years at around 4,000 people Death from coal power plant; premature death is estimated to be around 8,000,000 per year So in the past 37 years since Chernobyl accident, nuclear power is estimated to have killed 4,100 people… while Coal power and other fossil fuel burning is estimated to have killed around 300,000,000 people… And you have problem and safety concern with Nuclear? Seriously?

As i said its a hell of a way to make electrons excited

My Dad worked there instead of going to Korea.

E=Mc2, we are surrounded at all times by a gobsmacking amount of energy 🤯

You had a 16 year old physics teacher?

If you check his profile picture, do keep in mind said event he describes happened 1 month ago. Or one week before he posted this reply and updated his profile picture. 👀

That doesn't make sense. There is a coma there and he uses possessive for his teacher.

Yes they have passive mechanisms that don't rely on external power or activation. However, disposing of the decay heat is still an issue, even with Gen3 reactors. Gen3 reactors emergency coolant water is dimensioned for 72h, during which the reactor core can be cooled passively. If after 72h neither water can be supplied in sufficient quantities nor the cooling loops can be restored, even a Gen3 reactor core will inevitably melt down due to decay heat.

​@@Chris-uu2tdindeed But 72 hours? Thats plenty of time and honesty it Is really secure

@@seantaggart7382 Never asume something is fine or "plenty of time" when talking about nuclear reactors, i believe that is the ideal rule of thumb for nuclear power moving formard

@@Oureon true but honestly They PLAN SO THAT ITS LIKE 2+2=100!

@@seantaggart7382 One might think so under normal circumstances. But it's basically what happened to 2 blocks in Fukushima: Power lines and water lines were down due to the earthquake. Streets were mostly destroyed and the emergency generators were flooded. To exhaust the decay heat of one block, they needed about 60kg (128lbs) of water per second (5184t per day). They simply couldn't replenish the emergency cooling water before it ran out and the reactor cores ultimately melted down. Or think about the zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant: We are lucky that Russian soldiers are either too dumb or not determined enough. It's rather easy to siege a nuclear power plant, render it's emergency generators inoperable and cut it from mains power and water supplies for more than 3 days.

Is delayed fission even a thing? I know that "delayed neutrons" are a core aspect of stabilizing nuclear reactor power levels, but delayed neutrons come from fission product decays, not from U235 atoms that waited before fissioning. Once struck by a neutron, the fission event occurs faster than 10^-15 seconds. Or maybe you are using that term to refer to fission events triggered by the delayed neutrons, which I'd just think of as the reactor's shutdown transient curve. I've long been under the impression that the reactor would shutdown very quickly, possibly less than a second, but after doing some math and first-principles analysis, it seems that your intuition on timing is the more accurate description ... OK, I went way deeper on this than I had planned. The delayed neutron fraction is about 0.65%, and it's tempting (but wrong) to think that with the control rods in, all but 0.65% of the power evaporates almost immediately. Typical shutdown margin is only about 1%, which ensures the reaction rate will decrease to zero, but the delayed neutrons still have a very significant chance of triggering fissions, roughly 99% as high as their chance in a steady-state reaction (which was about 40% based on each fission generating 2.5 neutrons). So then I simplified what's known as the "point kinematics (differential) equation" by assuming that decay neutron production is non-varying and then solving for the steady-state power level when rho=-0.01 (ie, 1% shutdown margin). This yields about 40% of full reactor power, meaning that reactor power almost instantly drops to 40% on a curve determined by the 10^-5 second neutron generation time (aka, "lambda") -- ie, within a few milliseconds, hundreds of neutron generations have elapsed and you are already at or below 40% power. Then the rate of dropping all the way to zero, or to the 7% level of decay heat is going to be determined by the various delayed neutron group timings. I can get an intuition for that by pretending the faster groups are now prompt neutrons and solving the same math as before, and this is pretty crude, but best I can tell, yeah, it's going to take 10's of seconds to get below 7%, deep into the decay of group #2 w/ a 22-second half-life; if only group #1 and #2 remain and all other groups are treated as prompt neutrons, my simplified power level stabilizes at 14%, so yeah, it's going to take at least one 22-second half-life, plus a little to account for the rate at which those isotopes are produced being more than zero (somewhere between 13% to 40%). So yeah, seems like your intuition is backed up by the mathematics. And I got a bit nerd sniped. And understand the math a bit better than I did before. So, thanks.

Glad someone corrected him. Decay heat is an issue for months after shutdown.

@@kevinmeganck1302 passive cooling is part and parcel of a gen 4 design. But, name even one meltdown that wasn't human induced. Yes, a malfunction of some sort occurred, but had a human action been correct, the meltdown would've been avoided. A good example, Chernobyl and TMI-2, both exclusively human errors that triggered the hot mess. Chernobyl, not recognizing xenon poisoning in the core until it "burned through" and the core experienced a rapid power excursion, TMI-2, misreading the signs and a lousy human factors design leaving a telltale lamp obscured from vision by being on the wrong side of a 7 foot tall console. And I know TMI quite well, it's around 3 miles from me and the remaining unit shut down in 2019. Kind of miss the cooling tower plume, was a convenient landmark that was visible for many miles around. Fukushima, again, human factors at a management level. Ignored warnings of an inadequate seawall and no venting outside the building through scrubbers for any hydrogen gas - something specified by the manufacturer as a safety improvement. A few meters taller and the site likely wouldn't have flooded and only the Japanese would even know that Fukushima even had nuclear plants. Getting emergency generators in place in time wasn't in the cards after a tsunami, so prevention was critical and ignored. Venting the hydrogen outside would've prevented what started as a TMI meltdown turning into Fukushima. And all had one other failure, which made things much worse - no communication with the local government about an emergency and precisely what was going on, even if it's uncertain.

"Boran"

Just what I was gonna say. Reactors normally operate on delayed fission, not prompt criticality or higher

The biggest thing in these reactor accidents (other than fukushima) was that these operators didn’t have the proper level of knowledge to understand what they were doing to their reactor plant and what was actually occurring. I agree with you that safety measures have improved, but at the end of the day a reactor will respond in a very similar way to changes in plant parameters and without proper training and full understanding of what the operators are doing, then no reactor is truly “safe”. Think about it, the US Navy had had nuclear reactors since the 60s and never had a reactor accident. Not even in the slightest. Thats due to full understanding of the reactor plants

Yeah, arguing against new reactors because the ones from the 60s were unsafe feels a bit like refusing to fly with an A380 because the De Havilland Comet tended to crash so often back in the 1950s. It's just not a very good argument and makes it look as if there were no better ones.

​@@gbulifant222Fokushima has disregarded multiple best practices and safety regulations in the construction of the reactor.....

Something that is important to note is that the old reactors are nowhere close to "unsafe", they normally have multiple safety features. The thing is, modern reactors would be even safer.

@@philipschmid9352 They didn't disregard safety practices during construction, they refused to redesign the plant after construction. That's nowhere near the same thing.

Yeah, but main problems are occuring when fuel is low enriched, like in RBMK series

About 1/6 the MW(th) output of a commercial reactor, correct?

"usually bullet proof" - in this context, the word "usually" is, what worries me the most. Didn't they say, RBMK-reactors cannot explode? Usually?

@@sigurdkaputnik7022 nothing is perfect, but the newer reactors (especially the molten salt ones, look up the "integral fast reactor" ) are far less prone to it

@@sigurdkaputnik7022 USSR was hell bent on proving the world that communism the way. They are more interested in appearing more advanced than they were. Hence the cutting corners and overpromises.

​@sigurdkaputnik7022 anything is usually bulletproof up to a certain caliber.

@@sigurdkaputnik7022They say the RBMK reactor cannot explode because they thought that there would be no one stupid enough to prime the reactor to explode. it may not be obvious to the common person, but to anyone even slightly knowledgeable in nuclear would know the only outcome of these actions. What they did is analogous to cutting your break lines because you were going too slow. In short the scenario is, this very dangerous reactor is not acting in the way that I am expecting, and I have decided to removed the control rods to raise the power even more to conduct a safety test. Do you see the irony of what was just said. Park rangers say it the best. There is a significant overlap between the smartest bear and stupidest human.

Not atomic, but nuclear. And faster than light. Electromagnetism is around 1e-15 s, while nuclear reactions are around 1e-20 s, or less, or more.

The fact that we were able to take multiple pictures within the first 10 milliseconds after a nuclear explosion is almost unbelievable

Agreed. In fact, i find those Rappatronic images to be INCREDIBLY mesmerizing an absolutely terrifying. When you look at them and realise that, that i that is the power of the atom in its purest form. Beautiful but very scary images. I have stared at them for a very long time in the past, contemplating what i was looking at. @@LukeA_55

@@DrDeuteron Yes, nuclear. My mistake. Gonna have to disagree with you on being faster than light. There is no way for the neutrons in the the chain reaction to move faster than light. Ive read extensively on this on the nuclear archive web page and i don't recall ever reading anything about faster than light. Not calling you a liar, im interested in what you mean. Can you help me out? I will never get bored of this subject. The conditions at the pit during supercritical reactions are just astounding. They make our sun look like a wet fart. Albeit, only for a fraction of a second (thank god)

Prompt critical reactions in a weapon are completely different than what happens in a nuclear reactor. Moderated delayed neutron chains are much, much slower.

Thanks for this comment. I didn't know that about water at 700°C. Something new to study! 👍

@@syntaxusdogmata3333 The pressure in their steam turbines are between 75 to 150 bar and you get what is called superheated steam. I am not a nuclear engineer but I know that superheated steam for ship turbines holds a working temperature of around 450 degrees centigrade. This is of course done with large boilers fired by gas or oil unless it is on a nuclear powered vessel. Unlike nuclear power plants ships have the possibility to dump steam to control the temperature or just simply shut down the boilers. Besides there are large safety valves that will open if the pressure gets too high. On a nuclear pressurized reactor you can not do that without also releasing radioactive material so you need very efficient cooling capacity. For both water and gasses there is a connection between temperature and pressure. If you take a well known gas like propane it has ambient pressure to the atmosphere at -42 degrees centigrade and will be in liquid form. If you have it in a tank at a temperature of 30 degrees centigrade the pressure inside that tank will be around 12 bar but the propane will still be liquid. Drop the pressure and the temperature will fall too. That is the basic principle of refrigeration.

@@runedahl1477Pressurized water reactors do not release radioactive material by dumping steam. The steam generators are located in a secondary loop to the primary. No radioactive material is in this loop => no radioactive steam dumps. If you lifted a primary relief, then yes potentially radioactive steam would be released but the radiation levels would be low and if you lifted a primary relief you have a lot to worry about because you’ve fucked up something severely at that point

@@gbulifant222 what spreads The radioactive material is not the steam but the hydrogen explosion that is caused by the enormous amount of hydrogen that is generated when the temperature of the steam goes above 700 degrees centigrade.This is what happened on all the three most known accidents. When it comes to gas explosion you have something that is called BLEVE (Boiling liquid evaporation vapor explosion). What is happening is that gas is spread over an area and self ignite. The explosion is huge and can resemble a nuclear bomb since you will also see a mushroom formed smoke cloud. There are probably some clips on UKposts if you want to see what it looks like. I have seen some footage that is not intended for public view but is shown to firefighters and people working with gas. The reason why it is not intended for public viewing is that it also shows people being killed in the explosion.

@@runedahl1477 I’m well aware of the mechanism by which a hydrogen explosion occurs in a reactor. However your statement about liquid sodium reactors isnt really a solution to the problem of being over 700° C. Pressurized water reactors aren’t designed to run that hot. No reactor is. If you’re above 700° C in any kind of reactor, you’re likely going to have a reactor accident. Even with liquid sodium, at that temperature you’re going to lift a relief and you know what happens when hundreds of gallons of liquid sodium starts reacting to exposed air? Also a very big boom

Yes

I want my very own SMR in my back yard so I can can be 'off grid' 😆

Chernobyl was a debacle when it was constructed. The roof was supposed to be reinforced and fireproof, instead a plain tar roof was installed. Which was flammable, exasperating the problem after the power excursion dismantled the reactor explosively. Had TEPCO not ignored the designer's production change of venting the reactor through scrubbers to the outdoors, Fukushima would've just been a TMI type of meltdown, with a few leaks from earthquake damage and far more manageable. Had they raised the seawall, as warned to do, the site never would've flooded. Both show risk acceptance beyond what should be considered acceptable - at a level not witnessed since the last two space shuttle explosions. Better to face a faded giant report than a pinnacle faded giant, with accompanying big black eye for regulators and operators alike. Or for example, TMI vs Fukushima/Chernobyl. Middletown, PA is still inhabited, no cancers since that meltdown and the second unit was only shut down for financial reasons in 2019. Chernobyl's remaining unit remains online (save when shut down due to some hostilities and foreign troops digging in and stomping around the grounds), but the entire region remains an exclusion zone for good reason. As thousands of Russian soldiers will learn as they contract various cancers fairly soon.

Indeed And Really? You're unlikely to find a RBMK reactor nowadays

@@seantaggart7382 true, it's hard to find the 2 in Leningrad, 3 in Smolensk and 3 in Kursk. It's not like the cooling system leaves any sign that it exists. The last RBMK is schedule by Russia to shut down in 2034. Then, they'll be as common as the Dodo bird. If it wasn't for an unauthorized experiment, performed by workers that never should have performed it in the first place (the day shift was conversant with the test and all permutations of things that could've gone sideways), nobody would know the name Chernobyl. And in Soviet Russia, nobody talked about nuclear meltdowns, the nuclear meltdowns talked about you.

@@spvillano yeah And bwrs are just better

@@seantaggart7382 BWRs are better than what? RBMK, PWR?

No. The isotopes that are created are unstable and must decay, and that causes the heat buildup. A neutron absorber won't stop this, because it is inherent in the material, it is not a chain reaction anymore.

Not to mention SL1

Can't forget about the SRE (Sodium Reactor Experiment) meltdown that occurred at Santa Susana Field Lab in 1959.

@@shaggyd485 You can't really call an experimental meltdown an accident similar to Chernobyl. When you have an experimental research facility, a meltdown is expected as a possible outcome from the outset. Unless the experiment lost containment, that's just a data point. I guess you could call Chernobyl an experiment. But the experiment was supposed to be a functional test of the turbines, not a test of what happens when you remove all the control rods, poison the reactor for several hours, and then suddenly insert the control rods back. We already knew what would happen if you did that, even back then. Well... some scientists knew. The ones working the night shift evidentially did not.

According to an angry Russian, the Americans caused Chernobyl because they kept taking away Russia's smartest people.

Good point. Did you know that they blew up a reactor on purpose in the open desert in Idaho only 1/4 mile from SL1, called the PBF (Power Burst Facility)? Boom. The camera film was grainy from the gamma flux.@@Mathignihilcehk

I think around that was the point that they figured that if you had a meltdown, any steam that was created before it coiled that split the hydrogen and O2 to make a big boom any possible explosion would be extremely small. I guess they figured being in the ocean, even in the worst case they could flood it with seawater and still swim away rather than having some sort of meltdown that would go boom or kill everyone onboard.

Same idea as when someone says "thousands of man hours", not literally thousands of years.

@@nukesrus2663 Ye I still find that misleading AF though. A jobs site doesn't say 1,562,358 man hours since last accident. It give days since for a reason.

Statistics in total operating units is extremely common. Aircraft accidents per flight hour, car accidents per mile driven, etc. A duration actually tells you little. A GM car plant with 10,000 employees operating for 300 days with no accidents and Steve’s bike shop, one guy, operating for 300 days with no accidents are not the same. Duration is a very dumb metric. 176 aircraft fatalities worldwide last year. Only 1 in 1908. Flying has gotten tremendously more dangerous?

“As of May 2023, there were 436 nuclear reactors in operation in 32 countries around the world.” “The average age of these nuclear reactors is about 42 years old.” That’s 18,312 years of operation, not including plants that have been retired. “Thousands” (2200+) in the US alone.

comedy fail

I thought it was amusing... certainly not a fail to the empathetic of us...

Ha. That's funny. Got a good chuckle out of me.

lmfao, run

Wdym?

Fit that change your mind about fmr president Jimmy Carter?

Indeed I think this one game had a good title for it RCIC Aka When power is gone steam powers it

I mean, we were trying to use the heat from the reactor to power the pumps to keep the reactor cool way back during Chernobyl. The problem with Chernobyl being that they blew up the reactor in the middle of the test. They weren't even testing for that.

We are 3 miles from three miled islands

I bet there's some awesome things he could tell you about. Don't wait till it's too late, there's so many things I wish I had talked to my grandparents about

And to reduce vehicle fires after collisions various safety features were added to the electrical and fuel systems, for example in a modern car any airbag activation will trip the fuel pump circuit and require a dealer or body shop to reset it, also the gas tank was repositioned so it's not susceptible to damage from minor rear end collisions and the filler neck was moved from behind the license plate to a more protected location usually on a rear quarter panel and it's now located higher up. Also they now contain a check valve so that fuel cannot spill during a rollover

And on me regulatory side, you have organizations like the NTSB in the US that sets safety standards for new vehicles, and on the operator side you have updated driver training programs for new drivers as well as awareness campaigns for the dangers of intoxicated or distracted driving and also enforcement of traffic regulations like police pulling over distracted drivers or things like speed traps red light cameras etc

well, a partial meltdown is better than a full meltdown. better to lose a single reactor than to lose the whole plant or possibly irradiate the surrounding areas in the case of a catastrophic meltdown.

I think many of the thorium power companies are fluid core? CopenhagenAtomics reactor for example. Liquid core, liquid moderator, liquid fuel blanket (breeding something something? I haven't yet grasped their exact plans). Re: horizontal fuel channels, I don't think it changes much in meltdown equation? The active zone is anyway close to spherical, right? And the amount of material that could melt down is thus the same. Control rods can drop inside the channels by gravity, if they're vertical. And I guess fewer structural supporting elements needed in vertical configuration.

CANDU reactors do use horizontal fuel channels.

That's right -- if the fuel is normally molten, by design, a meltdown is no concern.

Meltdowns can still happen- Its not like the uranium can mix in with the salt

@@shoeskode136 > Yes, it can. UF6 and I think there is another valence as well.

@@shoeskode136 in Molten salt reactors the fuel is dissolved in molten salt which has a boiling point of around 1500⁰C (2700⁰F). The fuel can be uranium plutonium or thurium. These reactors can not reach these temperatures as the expansion of the fuel as it overheats will move the fuel atoms to far apart for the nuclear reaction to happen. Molten salt reactors also have a drain pipe that is plugged by chilled plug of salt. If power is lost or the reactor gets to hot this salt plug melts and the molten reactor fuel / salt drains into a lower drain tank that is designed not to support the nuclear reaction and shed off decay heat through non-powered air convection. So no, a molten salt reactor can not melt down or explode because the fuel is already melted.

@@stanleytolle416 wow. Thats. Impresive wowie

most plants are dsigned to fail-safe. it's really only in the case of a disaster causing significant damage or opperator failure/ bypassing safety that causes meltdowns. While there may be a couple plants that end up melting down, i'm pretty sure most would end up failing safe.

@@jonathankydd1816 Interesting. So then what does a fail safe status look like six months, a people years, ten years, etc with no one does anything?

I meant 150-200mw electrical output.

The sister reactor probably had pumps that functioned, unlike Fukushima that had pumps knocked out by tsunami? Can you provide a link? The video was pretty clear (if superficial) about the fact that dropping control rods does *not* stop the nuclear reaction. Back to 0:00 you go.

What happened in Fukushima was once in a millennia natural disaster. Japan is prone to earthquakes, but they are mostly tolerable thanks their earthquake-proof construction. There have only been a few instances of 9 magnitude earthquakes in recorded history and none of them were in Japan. No amount of training in any country can prevent that disaster.

That's wrong

That is very interesting! I saw recent news that Canada is enabling some of their reactors to continue operation beyond their initial lifespan figure since they need a lot more energy.

@@RiDankulous Pickering, Canada's longest operating power-plant started in I believe it was 1971, it had been extended I think 3 times and is only 2 years younger than Switzerland's nuclear reactor which is the longest operating reactor in the world. Canada keeps renewing the contracts because the reactors are good. Plus we're not building a bunch of SMRs to keep the grid going. Ontario, the part of Canada with the most reactors, is one of the cleanest grids in the world and actually has the occasional day about once a year where the grid runs 100% green.

@@michaelbauer4065 That's great!

True, but some of those were critical safety systems that were never supposed to be bypassed. for example, there was a hard limit on the number of control rods that they were allowed to remove. during the test IIRC, they removed beyond that limit because the reactor wasn't producing enough power to sustain it's own systems yet.