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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Far more disgraceful is that as a person with a background in nuclear engineering, he failed to support the industry and was instead promoting coal and solar and such nonsense.

His administration also did not defend against a lawsuit that ended examinations for civil servants, thus helping ensure the worse quality of future bureaucrats.

Firstly, that happened late in his term, secondly...

Nothing bad really happened at TMI apart from a massive financial loss, because the design of the reactor was fundamentally sound.

Despite gross negligence, there was no radiation release worth mentioning, just some amount of contamination of the power plant. And this is one of the top 10 power plant disaster, ever.

Had it not been for operator error- a valve was closed off that should have allowed emergency feedwater into steam generators for extra cooling - the reactors would probably still be in operation.

It's darkly funny, as one of the reasons for the meltdown is possibly obesity. An operator did not notice the signal one that a emergency feedwater pump valves was closed because his fat gut blocked the view:

The valve position lights for one block valve were covered by a yellow maintenance tag. The reason why the operator missed the lights for the second valve is not known, although one theory is that his own large belly hid it from his view.[32] The valves may have been left closed during a surveillance test two days earlier.[33][34] With the block valves closed, the system was unable to pump any water. The closure of these valves was a violation of a key Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rule, according to which the reactor must be shut down if all auxiliary feed pumps are closed for maintenance. This was later singled out by NRC officials as a key failure.[35]

All in all, big fuckup resulting in nothing more than a 2 billion $ of damage.

Still, it does seem like people operating the plant weren't trained properly - e.g. allowing the design to run without back up feedwater pumps, when those are needed to avoid partial meltdown - seems like a very odd decision.

Now, there's plenty of designs that do not even require emergency core cooling systems, for various reasons.

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