A Nuclear Submariner Challenges a Pro-Nuclear Film NYT, By ANDREW C. REVKIN, 16 Aug 13 ”……Now to the Hansen video. Untrained and inexperienced in nuclear engineering, he nevertheless claims that so-called Generation III reactors will be passively safe. If electrical power is lost, they will simply cool down on their own. Maybe. Maybe not.
Four Westinghouse AP1000 (Gen III) nuke plants are now being built (two in Georgia, two in South Carolina). But had the Fukushima plants all been AP1000s, they would have melted too, because they can only go without power forthree days, and it took 11 days to get power turned back on in all four reactors.
Worse yet, no one ever built a demonstration AP1000 nuke plant to prove they really are passively safe. Small demo plants often reveal design errors that can then be corrected before full-size plants are built. Without one, we’re investing $24 billion without knowing whether these four plants will ever work as promised. How rational is that?
Last, the ultimate inherently safe reactors the nuclear industry wants to build are the same liquid sodium fast breeder reactors that can explode or melt down. Good luck with that.
So I urge you, don’t believe “Pandora’s Promise,” James Hansen, or the nuclear industry. Their views are false, one-sided, and so contrary to reality that it is fair for me (now a Ph.D. social psychologist and journalist) to call them delusions — shared, motivated distortions of reality………. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/a-nuclear-submariner-challenges-a-pro-nuclear-film/?_r=0
