Grid-scale battery fire in upstate New York

[oil pan 4]

Yeah, of course NU has a lower fuel cost, but nuclear fuel is so cheap anyway, didn't really make much sense when you were compromising safety. Most people also don't know that Chornobyl continued to operate after the meltdown until into the early 2000's.

That's an interesting (and amusing) point. There have been other reactor incidents, such as:
- Windscale was a graphite pile fire, but that was a weapons program reactor.
- TMI was a PWR, but of course it only bricked itself, it didn't explode

But yeah, both Chornobyl and Fukushima were boiling water reactors, though their designs obviously differed significantly. James Krellenstein has a Decouple Podcast episode on some nuclear history and I know he's not super excited about the BWRX-300 for some quite valid reasons. I've not listened to it yet, but if you'd like me to link it, I'd be more than happy to.

Chernobyl reactors were designed at the height of the coldwar and we know the USSR liked their nuclear weapons built with highly enriched uranium. So it's logical they would try to make reactors that use natural or delpleated uranium. That's why we won the arms race without bankrupting our country. We could breed fuel infinity faster and lot cheaper than we could enrich it.

I thought Chernobyl was still operating.

I would like to know more about the bwrx300.

 

[OVERKILL]

Chernobyl reactors were designed at the height of the coldwar and we know the USSR liked their nuclear weapons built with highly enriched uranium. So it's logical they would try to make reactors that use natural or delpleated uranium. That's why we won the arms race without bankrupting our country. We could breed fuel infinity faster and lot cheaper than we could enrich it.

The US weapons program was definitely superior to the Soviet one. The RBMK was also able to produce plutonium for weapons production, that was part of the "dual purpose" of the design.

I thought Chernobyl was still operating.

Nope, she's been offline since the end of 2000/early 2001. They started decommissioning in 2015.