

"Nothing like this will be built again" - A Nuclear Reactor Tour - jseliger
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/rant/torness.html

======
Gibbon
I went on a similar tour of one of Canada's CANDU Uranium/Deuterium plants in
high school (The one in Pickering, Ontario
[http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/pickering/index.html?data...](http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/pickering/index.html?dataPath=/photogallery/regions/toronto/gallery_532/xml/gallery_532.xml))

Especially freaky was the containment pool, glowing blue with cerenkov
radiation, with nothing but a lead window between you and and an ugly death.

They were many checkpoints to go through with detectors that check your shoes
and hands for radioactive dust and I inadvertently set one off. I had not
placed my hands on the sensors exactly right and the machine went off, scaring
the sh*t out of me and everyone else.

The most interesting thing about CANDU reactors is the vacuum building that
can suck all the air out of the reactor buildings in the event of a deuteurium
steam leak. Dampening rods are also held up by electromagnets that will drop
and kill the reaction in the event of an electrical failure.

~~~
sketerpot
Some research reactors have nothing but water between you and the fuel rods in
the core. It's pretty good shielding, but it's still freaky to see a working
reactor core right before your eyes.

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jedc
Interesting. I used to be a Navy submarine officer, and qualified and ran our
boats reactor. Not nearly the size of the plant he's talking about, but lets
say that we needed to be able to handle bigger... transients. :)

I'm glad he brought out one of the big points in US/UK nuke plants; the
professionalism. It's hard to understand until you've experienced it.

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wallflower
"I can report that, standing on top of an operational 600 MW nuclear reactor
weighing several thousand tons, all you can feel is a slight rumbling
vibration like distant traffic felt through a road surface -- there's no
indication that metres below your feet, hundreds of tons of gas compressed to
conditions more normally associated with the surface of Venus are being
blasted through the guts of a radioactive inferno."

I've never quite had such a clear visual picture of a nuclear reactor in
operation.

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billswift
They are at least as likely to build a descendent of this reactor as a BWR or
PWR, because High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors are inherently safer than
either of the water cooled types. The Pressurized Water Reactors became the
dominant type because they were directly descended from Naval sub and ship
reactors, not because they were actually better than other types. They were
used on ships because they were more compact than other types, which is not a
particular necessity on land.

------
abstractbill
_A stack of these tubes, bolted together and held under tension by internet
rods..._

Internet rods hold the tubes together? Typo, presumably? Or a joke I'm
currently too hungover to appreciate?

------
pavel_lishin
_some embedded controllers in racks in the auxilliary deisel generator control
rooms have EPROMs which have been known to be erased by camera flashes in the
past_

Am I the only one terrified of the fact that any part of a nuclear reactor can
be tampered with by a flash of light?

~~~
m104
It's a known problem, but not a cause for concern:

[http://www.hanford.gov/rl/?page=671&parent=666](http://www.hanford.gov/rl/?page=671&parent=666)

The worst that will happen is that an emergency/safety system will be tripped
accidentally. The workaround is to mask the EPROM windows (with tape, I
assume) after programming them.

~~~
Tangurena
EPROMS usually have a paper sticker glued onto them. As the sticker had
details printed on them. The glue on most printer-compatable stickers gets old
with age and thus they fall off.

Due to pricing quirks, the EPROMs with windows were far cheaper than the same
chips that didn't have quartz windows on them. They weren't ROMS, they were
the same IC, but with an opaque lid.

~~~
joe_bleau
Funny, I remember windowed ceramic parts as being quite a bit more expensive
than epoxy plastic with no window, which would be a OTP (one time
programmable) EPROM. Use the high dollar windowed devices during development
or for unstable projects, then switch to plastic OTP once the code settles
down for better production margins.

The good stickers we used were metallized polyster, I think. They were a bit
more opaque than paper, as measured by the time it took to UV erase a device.

~~~
Tangurena
I'm sure things have changed, but the last time I made stuff with EPROMs was
back in the 80s. When cleaning out a garage back in the late 90s, I threw out
several old arcade video games ( _She Who Must Be Obeyed_ had commanded it),
and the stickers had fallen off all the EPROMs.

------
russell
A great tour of an operational nuclear power plant by Charlie Stross, one of
my favorite science fiction authors. Charlie is one of us, a unix/web guru
before he became a full time author and, I believe an HN regular. Take a look
at Accelerando or The Atrocity Archives.

~~~
randallsquared
I don't think I've seen him post here, though he's probably aware of the pg/yc
scene, at least peripherally.

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mixmax
_"nearly a million horsepower"_

that's only around the same as 59 Wally yachts...

[http://www.wally.com/jumpch.asp?idChannel=44&idUser=0...](http://www.wally.com/jumpch.asp?idChannel=44&idUser=0&attivo=2-7)

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asciilifeform
> "nothing like this will be built again"

Oh, but trust me, it will be: when fossil fuels become truly scarce and the
antinuclear Luddites are shot, as they ought to have been decades ago.

~~~
sketerpot
Read the article. The reason why nothing like these huge gas reactors will be
built again is because the enormous capital costs of building one outweigh the
better thermal efficiency. It's more economical to build other types of
nuclear reactors.

~~~
jcl
That said, I was a bit disappointed by the proposed shutdown date of "thirty
to forty years" mentioned in the article... that they would go through all the
trouble and resources of making an ultra-efficient plant, then run it for less
than a century.

------
ajkirwin
I love nuclear reactors. I went on a tour of the GCR at Oldbury, in the UK,
once.

Even got to see them changing one of the rods (Though of course, from a
considerable and safe distance).

It was pretty sweet.

