Nuclear reactors are not cheap to make, like automobile engines or computers. They construct of high tensile steel designed to withstand high temperatures. The melting point of steel is around 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, and with tungsten and molybdenum added, this brings it up a bit. The reactor is an enclosed vessel encasing fuel rods that hand in the coolant. Nuclear fission makes fast neutrons, beta particles and others, and the steel slowly increases in mass because of neutron capture, and the vacant orbitals of the transition metal vessel pick up electrons. The result of this constant action produces a vessel that becomes brittle at around one hundred years.
Brittle things crack under stress and all nuclear reactors must be replaced dependent on the size of the pile and the fission intensity.
The coolant of nuclear platforms is continuously under debate. Water works well, but the reactor must place on the coast of a continent because extreme quantities are necessary to cool the reactor to salient values. Due to this physical observation, brilliant scientists postulate a liquid sodium-cooled reactor. Metals conduct heat and radiation better than any mass, and the metal can be reused until it becomes radioactive or changes in mass. In the native state, the metal sodium, sitting at the top left of the periodic table with extreme ionization potential, explodes on contact with water and burns upon contact with air. In a human environment, where “to err is human” this action does not seem prudent and at best dangerous. Using the metal Galium, which is liquid at room temperature and is placed on the left side of the periodic table akin to the transition metals, seems feasible. The result of intense neutron bombardment over time has not been considered to date and volatile gallium at two thousand degrees does not seem innocuous. Digress to steel production and all steel workers complain of “fume fever”. What really is the best coolant element? Time will tell and the talk around town is that arsenic placed in a nuclear reactor neutron port eventually becomes gold????? This author thinks water if the best way to go because of track history. The nuclear plant at San Onofre, California still produces energy and is at least 75 years old. Radioactive water enriched in deuterium and tritium makes hydrogen bombs, but decay means they must be replaced every seven years. A fissile will detonate tritium and this author is sure that top secret scientists continually work on a method or technic that permits fusion temperature ignition at minimum temperatures using a fissile.
What is breaking radiation? Bromstrellung as Al Rombauer used to say, occurs when fast neutrons strike a transition metal in a crystalline lattice and produce gamma and X-radiation in a photoelectric effect. Around each nuclear reaction vessel , there must exist a steel wall to decrease the energy and range of the nascent free neutrons. After the steel wall, concrete, in extreme proportions and thickness, provides the mass to absorb high-intensity light spectrum radiation, all in a solid and massive form. When the concrete second shield starts to develop powdering,, it is time to bail out and decommission the site.
The offices and control systems of the site must station behind these two shields and to all poor biologists trained to handle isotopes, the admonition of distance and shielding are constantly in mind. Electric generators using energy present in the reactor coolant sit alongside the fission kettles and are dealt with the same as the reactor vessel because they too become intensely radioactive with time.
Changing fuel rods remains as the ever-present danger close, and it seems timely to state that breeder reactors need fuel rod changing at a greater time interval than standard reactors. Thus, due to the nature of human beings, it seems safer to have breeder reactors than standard configurations.
All sorts of new designs pop up, created by rich and privileged minds, like uranium mixed with ceramic, making balls that slowly fall out of a hopper at the bottom, kind of like a grain silo in Kansas. Nuclear reactors with fissioning, glowing plutonium at one thousand degrees are not like corn to be sold to an ethanol maker. Their exists no time or training to remedy or fix things and it seems logical to a neophyte without a degree in nuclear physics that fuel rods hanging by a chain, amongst neutron dampeners that limit the rate of fission seems the safest way to go. If a coolant leak exists the dampers, now made of silver, can fall down and lock into place, preventing a nuclear incident.
The most salient feature of high technology, expensive, dangerous energy producers is that these edifices require constant human attention and moderation. Nuclear reactors connected to a grid, away from a city but close enough to impact it, must be designed so the site is idiot proofed, and safe to all so a policeman, if necessary, can enter the control room and shut down the reactor. Every human being has a bad day, their wife is leaving them, their son is in the hospital, they have a hangover from a bad batch of tequila and more. Accidents most certainly will happen, but the controls will be simplified, easy to read and configured so anyone who can read can control. From this author’s understanding, all nuclear incidents are accident-based, not due to an explosion caused by 007, or a disintegrator from Mars. Responsible people will be selected by the government, by Psychologists who study them, and by their dedication to defy the human dilemma. On her day off, she looks out the window after her shower, and she feels cooped up. And so it goes.