About the "diver" incident. Lots of the safety measures he talks about were adopted because of this incident. When you read the report on it, most of it's recommendations for improvement match with what he describes.
This. ...there are two types of achievements: 1) getting a thing named after you did something smart. 2) getting a procedure implemented after you did something stupid.
The author of XKCD is a former NASA employee so I suspect the research reactor in question at the end is probably somewhere in the DOD/DOE sphere as opposed to, say, a university and thus much more likely to be high security. I'd much rather try to break into Berkeley than, say, the nuclear research portion of the Idaho National Laboratory.
Well, I don't know. Berkeley has a robotics department. Just saying, if the choice is between armed guards and a bunch of robots hunting you down, one would be much quicker and less scary.
@@andregroo if armed guards are the norm at commercial reactors, and only absent from most research reactors because they’re on college campuses, then it being hyperbole isn’t the most logical explanation
@calummcconnell7313 and if the research reactor belonged to the United States department of defense, you're dammed right they got armed guards. Not only to safeguard the radioactive material, but to safeguard whatever research the military is up to. L
I believe the bit about "not agreed on what to do with dry casks" is leaning more on the general public's reaction of "god no, don't do store it within a 100 miles of me" and fear of "glowing green goop" than a lack of sound proposals etc.
@@fallout921 Yea, I think the What If episodes that are getting animated are pretty old from their earlier What If books, and are basically just some of the more popular ones they answered getting video format.
Well, in that case, I've said before in multiple places that I'm fine with them building a nuclear power plant in my backyard. I'll add to that that I'm also fine with them building a nuclear waste storage facility in my backyard. Assuming it's up to modern standards for those things, of course.
This is one of your best videos. First, the guy at XKCD is not a bullshitter at heart. Second, you provide a lot of excellent information in a short time.
Yeah, Randall Munroe is the guy behind XKCD and he used to work for NASA in some capacity, I forgot exactly what but for some reason I think it related to physics or engineering.
@@tfolsenuclear That 2010 Swiss nuclear plant insadent is the definition of: "the people who have to swim close to the bottom of a spent nuclear fuel pool need to carry a radiation counter with them at all times inside of the spent nuclear fuel pool!" 😅😅😂😂🤣🤣
TIL that, even in the same room as the hottest hot stuff in a nuclear facility, you're still far more statistically likely to die of _lead_ poisoning than of radiation sickness.
Sooo, in conclusion... If you manage to get on site, somehow get in the building of the spent fuel pool, the chance for you to take a swim in the pool is close to zero due to the lead concentration in the air rather than radiation. With a high chance of death within seconds if you make a run for the pool
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018the outer casing might be brass but it will still be a lead bullet a small percentage of bullets might be copper or steel but those are rarer
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 Copper, not brass. And if that copper jacket tears off (not uncommon) you have lead in you. Or more specifically, a lead/tin alloy. US military is moving to lead free in some of it's bullets (7.62mm Nato to be precise) but that process is far from complete
A word on "struggling to recycle"... Solar and wind farms "struggle" to find anyone willing to _PAY_ for the recycling. Virtually everything about them _can_ be recycled. For the record, high level spent nuclear fuel can be recycled ("reprocessed") as well. We don't because it's expensive. Similarly, no one wants to recycle styrofoam because it's so low density it costs a fortune to transport it. ('tho there are specialty trucks with equipment to process it into dense blocks, but it faces the same cost problems.)
The foam thing, believe it or not, is wrong. This is coming from a furniture warehouse recycling worker, yeah I'm a lowlife so stop reading. But yeah, we have a mediocre electric furnace with a styrofoam shredder and a hot rotating chute. It poops thick white turd looking styrogoo into a square metal frame, where it cools into a brick like dense glass, and we would stack those 3x4x4 and sell them to the local waste management for $500... UNTIL we gave a local buyer a tour and they offered $1000 per stack of bricks. So they're definitely not least-efficient-cost or unusable, despite that being a good guess if you were any average joe. It probably still costs a lot for the furnace and the cost to run the heat for it, but probably not 500 of electricity, and the machine eventually paid for itself certainly. It's only good if you have a massive supply of foam, which any furniture packaging related place would be creating. No matter what though, the same high volume of cardboard and plastic was absolutely a cost sink, could never be solved for profit. Not that I think it has to be profitable, a single percent of the military budget would be totally worth spending on eating the cost of proper recycling.
@@RoundShades Then convince every trash department around the globe to equip every trash truck with an EPS "densifier". I didn't say it couldn't be recycled, but nobody will _collect_ it for recycling. ('tho they waste the same space and fuel collecting is as trash for landfills.)
We don't reprocess spent fuel because of Jimmy Carter. He was worried about nuclear proliferation even though other countries reprocess their spent fuel.
False. The law has changed since Carter was president. US companies may reprocess spent fuel, it simply has not been cost effective to do so. Should the price of uranium increase substantially (e.g., over $135/kg), reprocessing might be an option in the US. And before raising the French or Russian programs, note that they have different business models and policies where reprocessing has a role.
Maybe in the US wind and solar industry strugles to find lcost effective recycling solutions. In Europe it is no problem. There is more capacity for recycling wind/solar parts than needed for the coming years. More advanced recycling methods, which don't downcycle, are being developed too.
@@bigpatty823 In a lot of US plants the Spent Fuel Pool is part of the Auxilary building which has people moving around all the time (operations, security, fire rounds, maintenance, engineers and planners, etc,). At both plants I worked in where I had access to the Auxiliary Building anyone could enter the SFP area and as long as you properly divested yourself of loose objects, filled out the FME logs, taped and lanyarded up, etc. you cold just walk around the spent fuel pool without anyone questioning you (I was the Spent Fuel Pool Cooling and Structures engineer at one plant - and routinely walked the Spent Fuel Pool). There were no special barriers - just a yellow line on the floor and warning/instruction signs on SFP area entry requirements. There were closer yellow lines painted that you could not cross closer to the pool without wearing a life jacket without violating procedures.
I'm also an engineer who has worked in nuclear power plants (in the USA). I was the SFP Cooling and Structures system engineer as well. I've walked around the SFP many times as part of routine walk-downs. At our plant there was a table where you divested yourself of all loose items, taped up, and logged in whatever you were taking in, and brought out. Even our pens and clipboards had to be on lanyards attached to ourselves. I know of two cases where divers were put into the pool to do work underwater. Extensive briefings and they did not get close to any recent fuel (in fact Reactor Engineering/Operations did a fuel assembly shuffle to move rather old spent fuel to the area being dived on). It also seemed that about every 5 years according to verbal history someone fell in and went swimming until they got them out (you are correct about the life jacket requirement - our plant had a yellow line on the floor adjacent to the pool that you could not enter without a life jacket on. In my plant no one would pick up any debris without specific direction from Radiation Protection. I was once the designated person to recover some hot debris, bag it, and hand it out to RP that was discovered hung up in the tubesheet of the RHR heat exchanger that was opened for eddy current inspection - and was specifically briefed on that and we had worked out which tools I would try to use 1st before resorting to hands as the last resort (and I had film badges taped to my fingers and back of my hand, and lower arm). However, one thing I have learned is that other countries have different standards and rules. It does not surprise me that the diving event occurred as described, nor that the presence of this debris was unknown. It sounds to me that it was a piece of a retractable neutron flux thimble tube which can need replacing due to fretting damage as it can vibrate against the lower core plate structure and the bottom plate of the fuel assembly. I was also the engineer who ran the plant eddy current program and know all about thimble tube fretting - and that you could reposition them several times (shorten them) to move the fretting area to new unfretted tube location before you had to replace them because they no longer extended far enough into the fuel assembly for neutron flux monitoring. A piece of this thimble tube from inside the reactor would be screaming hot for many years - if not decades. Several decades ago they came up with chrome platted thimble tubes which virtually stopped the fretting issue for new thimble tubes installed. Regarding leaking fuel rods where the zirconium cladding had failed in operation. We had at least one leaking fuel assembly in its own sealed cask parked in one end of the SFP. It was loaded into the cask underwater and the lid was bolted on underwater with remote tools. It still took some years to clean up the SFP water from the radioactive contamination from that leaking fuel rod. Have a great day,
"I was loaded into the cask underwater and the lid was bolted on underwater with remote tools." Hopefully that first word is a typo, and you meant *"It* was loaded".
Certainly hope YOU weren't lowered into the cask and bolted in! Lmao Thanks for the info. Should have listened to my grandfather and been a nuclear engineer like him.
This is your most on-point and informative video. Awesome work. For anyone wondering, the diver did not experience any injury as a result of the incident, nor are they at any increased risk of long-term health complications.
@@Taladar2003 To be fair, that was probably the supervisors risk. I mean, they both were likely following the protocols that were in place 14 years ago. Perhaps the diver regretted taking the actions suggested for a while, until they knew they hadn't sustained any real harm. But it's hard to follow the regulations that were put in place after the incident, so… More of a good thing that it happened with such a relatively safe outcome, if they had been more cautious the protocols might not have been improved at that time. Who knows what would potentially happen to cause them to be scrutinized instead.
I think the research reactor is so heavily guarded because they usually have highly enriched fuel, significantly higher enrichment than commercial power plant reactors.
There's been a big international effort over the past decade or so to convert research reactors to less-enriched fuel with the original HEU cores and plutonium sources being returned to national authorities for safe and secure disposal.
I'm pretty sure the civilian nuclear plants I've been in would not shoot you if you jumped into the spent fuel pool. They'd fish you out as if you fell in accidentally, then they'd make sure you weren't contaminated, then they'd most likely have you arrested for something and they'd 100% certainly file all the necessary paperwork to make sure you never entered a nuclear plant anywhere ever again and change the procedures at their plant regarding who can get near the fuel pool.
@@davidg4288 Place I worked at a long time back had a swimming-pool reactor and, the story went, someone once fell into it while it was running. Supposedly a safety rail around the top gave way as they leaned over to hook a sample on a pulley line to drop it down to the core for irradiation. Their leg went into the water as they pivoted and grabbed the rail upright, stopping full immersion. They lost half a pair of trousers and Health Physics had a field day testing out their emergency procedures.
@@davidg4288 I fail to see how anyone other than plant staff cleared for entry into the Auxiliary Building at the plants I worked at could even get to the Spent Fuel Pool without being stopped by security - and yes shot if they did not stop prior to that. The one research reactor I toured many decades ago did not have armed guards so I can see people getting in and swimming in the fuel pool.
As someone who worked with nuclear materials in the "oh my god" when Randall Munroe (XKCD) mentioned the piece of tubing near the reactor core was exactly the same reaction I had. Right down to the close-eyes, cringe, then "oh my god". Great video. Randall Munroe is a knowledgeable person who makes topics like these accessible to the average person and doesn't get a lot wrong, but obviously doesn't have the same experience as someone who works in the field.
I love the guys friend's answer. Such an engineer's answer x3 Just hears the question and thinks to himself- "What do you mean swim int the spent fuel pool? The bastard gonna die of lead poisoning long before reaching the room"; Absolute fucking legend xD
As an engineering student, I visited that very same nuclear power plant that had the incident with the diver. And on the railing around the pool in which the reactor core is, they did actually have a sign saying something like "children under 14 are forbidden to swim without adult supervision." I will always remember that, because I love this type of humor.
It's a legitimate concern. Whenever I do high hazard work in the pool area I'm usually in a plastic suit. And I really wouldn't want to try and swim in it.
The weird thing about pesto bismol is that it's ever so slightly radioactive. Bismuth is a heavy metal which scientists once believed had stable isotopes, but turns out they are unstable (radioactive) but with a much, much longer half life than thorium or uranium. And by all rights bismuth is a heavy metal and should be pretty toxic like lead... but it's surprisingly not very toxic compared to other heavy metals. Fun facts about bismuth.
Yee.. looking at an article on that incident, a lot of the measures T.Folse mentions have been installed, but only after the incident... Supposedly the diver was not briefed not to approach foreign objects and saw it as part of the standard procedure of clean up after the scheduled task was done.
10:15 fun fact, that used to be a real product when atomic power was brand new. It was a energy drink sold in the 1920s that was water with (flavorless) Radium, a highly radioactive element. Thousands like Eben Byer suffered “Radium Jaw”
There was also "radioactive" toothpaste. For a radiating smile ;-) In talks I give I typically points out that the theory behind this is quite sound. It's true that radiation will tend to kill bacteria in your mouth - the problem is just that it also kills your mouth along with them ^^
1920s was rife with all kinds of radioactive tomfoolery, until people realized the only superpowers you are likely to get from ionizing radiation are necrosis and cancer.
Radioactive paint was used on clock hands historically as it would glow in the dark, and the people whod paint them would suffer the ill effects of radiation. Smoke detectors also are pretty radioactive (but if youre not shoving your hand into the middle after taking it apart youll be fine). Probably the most well known one is fiestaware which used uranium to glaze and make them shiny. Theyre especially dangerous if you put acidic food on them as it can "loosen" the coating and get on the food
Retired now but we HAVE put a diver in the pool. Looking for some problem with the liner (I forget the details as I wasn't directly involved). We have also disassembled a fuel assembly (BWR) to remove a known 'leaker' pin. Got some 'attaboy' from corporate for replacing the pin and returning the bundle to service next refueling. Leaker got sealed off stored in separate part of pool.
Lots of old incidents have become study cases, and the very reason we don't do things this way anymore. I don't know for the US, but in Europe many events categorized as incidents weren't even actual incidents, they were operations that were reevaluated later as being potentially dangerous, or even just too dangerous compared to alternatives, for example simply because it meant having a human performing the operation on site instead of using remotely controlled assets. But let's not pretend that we are enjoying decades of refining those procedures. It's the opposite of the oil industry, nuclear keeps getting safer (in part because of the public pressure) while the oil industry keeps getting away with worse and worse practices because it's not perceived to be as dangerous, despite insanely risky operations. Like, we'd never ask anyone to risk losing their arms at a nuclear plant, that's a major incident. Happens routinely in oil wells.
@@EzullofI always wondered I saw something on fracking and about how the materials they use end up being radioactive, not sure exactly what it didn't make sense to me and I didn't have a chance to follow up
@@whateverwhenever8170 Radioactive materials occur naturally inside the earth. Fracking and mining, and burning coal and gas, spreads any contamination around.
Thank you for covering this one. The moment I saw it, I was hoping for your take on it. I read the XKCD What If article it's adapted from years ago, and it getting animated was wonderful.
This video is a breath of fresh air in a society of uninformed people who are guided by paranoia. Pure facts, no drama, no guessing no thinking, just someone who knows what he's talking about. Thanks!
I remember interning at a nuclear plant in college, and while I still am pro-nuclear, I was there for some rather interesting events. In one case, a crane operator got too close to a surveillance camera and smashed it - over the reactor vessel. Needless to say, the outage was extended while they figured out how to retrieve the remains.
The biggest issue I think with nuclear power is that the public perception has been so demonized that the regulatory bodies have gone overboard with safety regulations. While safety regulations are necessary and critical to ensure the safe construction and operation of NPRs and SMRs, a serious review of the regulations should be conducted to eliminate those regulations that are there for good optics but don't actually do anything for safety and just increase costs. Since 1956 when the first nuclear power plant came online, there have been only 3 significant nuclear power plant accidents: 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi. That's a pretty amazing safety record.
Thank you sir very much for sharing your information about these topics of nuclear things. It’s not every day you get to learn about nuclear plants and or other topics. Massive respect for you sir thank you again. ❤
From watching some videos on nuclear accidents I learned one of the top rules, if someone tells you "Just put it in there", DON'T DO IT without clearing it with somebody else!
I really wish this channel was reaching a larger audience. I've watched for months now and, despite having already been dispelled of most nuclear energy myths, I learn a ton. Its a lot different to have a specialist with experience discussing things in contrast to other content thats usually just a deep dive "research" project for the creator.
Just being correct isn't enough to make it big on the platform, viewers on here who are willing to sit and learn out of sheer curiosity are relatively rare. The people who make it big on the platform cater to a broader audience, they learn communications tools, bring the tone of the language down to the minimum education level of the audience, became storytellers, learned how to develop narrative structures, how to keep dynamism in dramatic pacing, did voice training, they pay animators, they take sponsorship deals. All sorts of stuff that presumably didn't necessarily feel like their bread and butter at first. I really appreciate experts on the platform, but I don't think we should expect them to develop the specific interests necessary to optimally perform on the platform. These talking head videos have there own level of value that can't be quantified in views.
The diver story also sounds like it was in a small research reactor, not a commercial power-generating one, so the scale of it could have been significantly smaller.
The pool story was from the Leibstadt nuclear power plant, in Leibstadt, Switzerland. The IAEA and ISOE both have info on this incident. Exposure of a worker in excess of statutory annual dose limits - IAEA Posted on: 02 September 2010 Unplanned Exposure During Diving in the Spent Fuel Pool - ISOE/EPRI ALARA Symposium 2011 power point presentation
2:30 If this "waste spent" fuel is so "hot" doesn't that mean there is still a lot of energy there? If there is still energy there isn't it still useful and thus *NOT* waste? For a long time the saw mills here in Oregon produced tons of saw dust. The mills had to either pay someone to haul it away, or they had to pay to burn it on site. So when a guy showed up offering to haul it away for free, they were like "Sweet, take as much as you want." But as he kept showing up taking their sawdust away for free they started thinking, "If he's hauling it away for free, maybe he'd be willing to pay for it. He'd discovered that if you take the sawdust and compress it under high pressure the resin in the saw dust will glue everything together into a dense solid log. Wrap the log in paper, put it into your fire place and Presto, you have a log thatr will burn for a precise amount of time. History is full of times someone finds a use for something that was once just waste.
It’s too hot to mindlessly dispose of but not enough energy in the rods to be used in the core for energy production and theirs not much use for spent uranium fuel. Saw dust and uranium rods aren’t the same thing and can’t really be compared in the same context
@@ohdahngboi_2237 AIUI, spent fuel rods can be reprocessed to take out the uranium to make a new fuel rod, and the left over highly radioactive waste can then be stored. France does this, but the US foolishly has rules against this.
Your comments about the diver reminded me of when I was a medic a long time ago and we were taught “ if it’s wet and sticky and not yours don’t touch it” 😂
Thank you so much, Tyler, for getting this done so quickly! ❤ So interesting to learn about how the spent fuel is handled / handled differently in different countries
Hahhaa thought of you immediately when I saw this posted :) I also want to thank you for what you're doing, my late uncle was also working in nuclear power and I found it fascinating, he was a huge part of my becoming a huge geek... Sadly he passed away some years back, so your uploads are kinda nostalgic in a weird way :)
I think its important to note that SFP's only have Boric Acid if it is a PWR. Since BWR's don't control reactivity with borated water, there is no Boron in the SFP at those plants.
but basically, you're saying he massively undersold just how safe it would be swim in a spent fuel pool. If anything , this just further proves nuclear power is the way to go, and anyone standing in the way of that doesn't actually care about the environment at all.
There are people that wholeheartedly believe the anti nuclear stuff. But the people making the bad faith propaganda are mostly grifters or people with skin in the energy game (oil barons and such)
Many arguments against nuclear power are BS, I agree. But this doesn't prove that nuclear power is "the way to go". I live in Belgium, we have a few nuclear reactors, and we are currently facing the major problems with this technology: 1) When they get old, sometimes they need to be closed for several months for various reasons. Every single time, we are facing risks of blockouts if the weather becomes extreme. 2) The war in Ukraine showed us why a highly centralized power production is a terrible idea, and how the nuclear power plants are really valuable military targets. 3) The actual cost isn't cheaper than green alternative, especially if you want a "safety net" to counter 1) and 2). 4) In densely packed countries, like Belgium, there isn't any site respecting all safety measures for new nuclear power plants. 5) In regions with regular natural disasters, this is always a terrible idea (hi Fukushima). 6) And let's not even talk about incompetence (hi Tchernobyl). In a "perfect World" where you could create a World Grid (or a large enough one) and spread your nuclear power plants across the Globe, sure. In a divided World full of wars, this is a terrible idea.
@@AlcyonEldara 1) old outdated technology 2) nuclear is no more centralized than a solar field, like that one in TX that got wiped out. 3) yes it is. solar and wind are not cheap and must be replaced and rebuilt and maintained constatntly. the costs are already high and conprize a very small percentage of energy. Wind turbines comprise teh bulk of global platic waste already and can't be recycled. they are burned or dumped in massive landfills. 4) strawman, that's a cultural/people issue, not an issue with nuclear. just becauuse the belgians are irresponsible and lazy, doesn't make nuclear bad. 5) stop building power plants on fault lines then, and other high risk locations. again, strawman that has nothing to do with nuclear itself. 6) that's a repeat of #$ where you claimed Belgians are also incompetent. We're not so incompetent in the US with nuclear power. "Many arguments against nuclear power are BS" including yours apparently
@@AlcyonEldara I wouldn't call Tchernobyl "incompetence" I'd call it hubris. The problem was not incompetence itself but the hubris to believe that even if they did something wrong there could be no catastrophic failure.
my first college physics lab (1978?) has inertia experiments for us in a room with a cubic pile of lead bricks about 2 feet tall. we weren't told what it was. there was no constant supervision by an instructor or TA. some of us were taking off bricks and fooling around. the TA came in the room as was appalled, because it was a "radioactive nuclear source". we were hustled out of the room. we were sent home/back to our dorms immediately. the TA disappeared. it was never discussed again. we never went in/entered that room again.
Reading this comic almost a decade ago, I never imagined I would be hearing a voiceover by the author plus animation and reaction/commentary from a nuclear engineer! Great video
This is the first reaction video I've watched where someone has actually managed to keep my attention and made it really interesting/entertaining Keep up the quality content man 👍
according to the website of the swiss federal nuclear saftey inspectorate (ENSI) the 2010 incident happened in the fuel transfer pool during a maintenance shutdown. Translated by google translate: "During the maintenance shutdown, a diver carried out maintenance work in the fuel transfer pool. After completing this work, he collected loose material underwater as instructed. Among them was a pipe-like object about 30 cm long. The diver placed it in his tool basket. While the basket was being raised, a radiation protection worker measured the dose rate at the water surface. As the basket approached the surface of the water, the room radiation monitor triggered an alarm and the radiation protection measurement showed an increased dose rate. The basket was then lowered back to the bottom of the pool. The electronic dosimeter worn by the diver on his chest indicated a dose above the permissible annual limit. The evaluation of the dosimeters worn on the hands showed that the dose limit applicable to the hands according to the Radiation Protection Ordinance was significantly exceeded on the right hand." So yes, it happened...
My experience visiting a university research reactor was pretty similar to Tyler's. Minimal physical security, certainly no armed guards. What we were told was that they ran the reactor (I think) twice a week, and at their enrichment level a potential thief would be dead before they go out the door. Of course, that was in the 90s. They could easily upgraded their physical security in the last 25 years.
I went to college with an undergrad reactor, and the year before I got there some people had done an "expose" about how easy it was to talk their way in and smuggle a camera. What their video didn't show was all sorts of three-letter acronym folks knocking on their door the next morning. The students had done everything by the book: don't confront, watch where they go, and report it as soon as it's safe to do so.
Background radiation... the gravel in the local river is too radioactive to pass standards to make concrete for the control structure in said river ( it was started, torn down and rebuilt with imported gravel )
@17:00 Y-12 in Oak Ridge has an armed guard. It's a "research" reactor, but it's main purpose is manufacturing nuclear weapons. Perhaps that's the one his friend works at.
I once worked on a nuclear plant shut down, my job was in the lagging box under the reactor, it took 13 people two weeks to undo 4 bolts, pack them and retighten, once the lead shielded door slid open we had about 3 minutes max until our alarms went off, it was while untightening a bolt a load of water started leaking over my face/mask i was told it was just cold water from the rod pond, 12 hour shifts with about 3-5 minutes work per day. After the job finished, we had to have a scan. It was a very noisy 10+ ton block of metal and was about 5 inches above my nose...I've never been right since!
3:10 When the narrator said we aren't sure about what to do with nuclear waste, I think he meant that there is no clear agreement on which method is the best long term solution and that no one wants the storage to be in their backyard. Nuclear power has been so demonized that the general public has no idea how any of it works. Of all the means to generate electric power, nuclear is the safest and cleanest. The only reason it is so difficult to build new reactor is that the safety regulations are so extensive as to be almost impossible to satisfy.
1:30 this shot looking down at the open reactor is absolutely *terrifying* to me for some reason. Like, I know they're safe on that platform, but holy crap something in my soul is screaming that that is a Void of Death under them and that they should run as far and as fast as they can
Hey Tyler, one of my favorite biology channels (Nanorooms) posted a video titled "Bringing Biology’s Molecules to Life Using Physics", and I think it would be interesting to have you bring atoms to life using physics alongside him as he describes way that computational biologists can simulate behavior on the nanoscale.
I always wondered about the handle-ability of nuclear fuel and Plutonium cores. At a fundamental level though nuclear fuel is a mix of U 235 and U238. My understanding is neutrons do have to cross the cladding if it were not removed and slow down with a moderator and then go back into another fuel rod for the chain reaction to take place? This kind of inherently means there has to be a basic amount of free neutrons popping outside of nuclear fuel?
Safety depends a lot on where they are - my dad used to do some jobs in soviet nuclear reactors, fire alarms and such, he told a story of somebody finding an unmarked thick cable, the decision was to cut it with an axe as a result the only thing left of the axe was the wooden handle as it turned out to be some kind of major power cable.
In UK we use ROV for spent fuel pools or fed retrieval, not divers! 😅 If anyone came into contamination zone with anything except absolutely necessary and approved, a dosimetry officer would throw you out with all that junk. Every item leaving the zone has to be tested separately and deemed safe else you are not taking it back even if it’s your grandma’s priceless ring or whatnot. It goes to incinerator.
Not all reactors use boric acid and some research reactors test experimental fuels that sometimes have fuel failures. There are also some reactors that have been running for so many decades that there is historic foreign materials in the reactor vessel and fuel pool. Commercial power reactors generally shouldn't, and don't, have those sort of problems.
What blows my mind about all this is that that bit of tubing was still THAT radioactive after 4 years. How dangerous something radioactive is is a direct function of how short its half-life is. A short half-life makes it dangerous but necessarily short-lived. That thing must have been crazily hot when it first came out of the reactor.
Regarding armed guards in research reactors: if the reactor has been built as a neutron source, it may use highly enriched uranium (less heat, higher neutron flux), to the point that it may easily be weapons-grade, which is obviously a concern regarding possible nuclear terrorism, so armed guards are employed.
I have worked in 3 British nuclear power stations. Being the Magnox natural uranium type of reactors, they were routinely refuelled on load, with the charge/discharge machine then releasing the spent fuel elements to the cooling pond skips. If a fuel element had any leaks then it was bottled before releasing to the cooling pond. Unlike the ponds with PWRs, the pond water was dosed with Caustic Soda to pH 11 so anyone swimming in it would find their skin dissolving!! Due to absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the pond water was passed through a water treatment plant, the effluent from which was monitored and discharged to the sea. It was once necessary for divers to perform underwater maintenance, but they had full body suits (although one managed to spring a leak) and the fuel skips had been moved to an adjacent bay with the door closed. Aluminium scaffold poles in the water were corroded, however. The freshly discharged fuel could be identified by turning out the lights and seeing the bright blue glare of the Cerenkov radiation.
I thought of you immediately when I watched that video. Thanks for reacting to it (pun intended). I have a question about the "second burned" and third burned fuel rods: after the first burn, do they get sent to the pool to fully cool off before they get reloaded?
I have couple questions not related to a pool. Diesel generators can happily operate off-line and power plants generally don't. What are limiting factors not allowing operation at low power level? What would happen if demand suddenly drops but it's not a grid loss? Any way to dump excess energy before control loop can regulate down?
Question: Of the main problem is the gaseous by products cracking the fuel pellets and risking damage to the fuel rod cladding, why do we not re-refine the spent fuel and put it back into service (with required new cladding, obviously)? As I understand it, only about 5% of the useful energy is obtained before the above condition occurs…
So, from a incident report from the relevant power plant He did have multiple dosimeters They were not teledosimeters He was not briefed about not touching unidentified objects and to stay inside the surveyed area of the pool The plant did not have a procedure for collection of loose materials in pools It also did not have tracking of lost hazardous materials
Hello Tyler. I'm a guy who designs fuel racks. I'd love to use divers more often for installing racks in pools, but plant RP won't let me. 😫 Great video BTW. It's nice to have someone who knows what they're talking about make a video on a nuclear energy topic.
@3:00 Also by the time it's in dry casks most of the fuel is decayed. Within a century the material will be basically radioactive on the level of ore, not fuel. Radioactive fuel is actually remarkably easy to deal with policy wise in some ways because the process that makes it dangerous makes it inert; the more dangerous it is in the short term the less time you have to worry about it. It's the more medium level products (certain fission products that have million year half lives) that we don't really have a solution for, outside of separating them and burying them. If I remember 135 Cs in particular is a huge pain in the ass, but there are others.
A quick google of 'leibstadt nuclear power plant august 31 2010' found a couple interesting results. Including what looks like a powerpoint from the plant describing the incident, safety procedures that didn't occur, and the plan on what to implement now. One of which is that they did not have an official procedure for collection of loose materials at the time and would develop one.
Every dosimeter I've seen only uses sound to indicate unsafe radiation levels, which has always seemed like it would be insufficient for areas with even moderately high background noise. The diver incident is one of the first stories I've heard that confirms that, which makes me wonder why additional indication methods aren't implemented, such as vibration or a bright flashing light?