Nuclear reactors offer all the fun of leak tracing and invisible cracks with the added bonus that the fluids involved are extremely radioactive and contaminate everything they touch. This is why all the "just mass produce small reactors" and "just try thorium / molten salt" stuff hasn't taken off, and may never: all the beautiful theory disintegrates into man-years of laborious leak testing.
LWR coolant is not that bad. They keep the water very clean with ion exchange resins because otherwise you can have problems with corrosion. Workers sometimes float in the water during refueling where they flood the area about the reactor and spent fuel pond and open the lid of the reactor vessel.
Leaks in liquid metal fast reactors are much more obnoxious but still manageable. Sodium catching on fire when it hits air frequently isn't as bad as it sounds (a "pool fire" isn't particularly hot or dangerous but a "spray fire" can be) but it is important to catch sodium leaks quickly without false alarms and many development projects had trouble with that.
I always enjoy the handwaving by nuclear enthusiasts. These are some of the most difficult engineering systems routinely built and operated by mankind, where a coolant loss accident doesn't just destroy the reactor but can turn the facility into a multi-billion dollar cleanup effort in minutes.
I would liken this to airplanes. They are similarly difficult to engineer and maintain, they can also go very very badly in mere minutes if operated incorrectly, they also have very costly recovery procedures if they crash somewhere populated.
For both systems there have been catastrophic accidents that were national tragedies, from which we learned a lot. "The rules of aviation are written in blood," and that is also true for reactors. Past failures like the one you linked don't mean that reactors are unsafe; if anything, because we had that failure to learn from, reactors are now much safer. If we had a volatile technology like nuclear reactors and none of them had ever had any accidents, then I would be very hesitant to have one in my home town since it could very well be the first to ever blow up.
I think the reason they have seen a lot of success where nuclear reactors haven't is simply up to the fact that they are both cheaper to build and that the public can very directly see where the benefit to them comes from, whereas nuclear power is abstract and indistinguishable from coal to the average person.
I agree with your analogy to an extent, but I think it's got a very significant flaw.
The consequences of aeroplane disaster are localised in space (to the immediate vicinity of the vehicle and whatever it crashes into) and time (once the crash has happened, it is more or less over).
Nuclear disasters can have global effects, and can last for decades.
I'm cautiously pro-nuclear in theory, but am awestruck by the incredible forces unleashed and the extreme impact they can have when mishandled. It's far more potent than anything merely mechanical.
Monju was a poorly designed machine which was particularly badly run. I recently found a book they wrote about it and when I looked at the plans I thought "I can't believe they built that in an earthquake zone". I don't know if anyone is ever going to build another loop-type LMFBR as many of the problems you can have with a loop-type can't happen in pool-type reactors.
What was most shocking about the fire at Monju wasn't that it happened but that they tried to cover it up. Neither that nor the incident where they dropped the refueling machine into the reactor vessel were dangerous to people off site but the latter sure convinced everyone they didn't know what they were doing.
Contrast that to Superphenix where the fuel transfer drum failed and they struggled with a steam turbine system that was procured under corrupt contracts but overall had a good operational record. Or the three pre-1970s cases where there was significant fuel damage in the US but they found that a core melt in a LFMBR isn't as bad as it sounds because the iodine (most dangerous radioactive element in the fission products) reacts with the sodium and the NaI dissolves in the sodium so it doesn't go anywhere. Or EBR-II and the FFTF which performed flawlessly, or the highly successful fast reactors in Russia.
"Construction started in 1986". Is this an example of an accident that would not occur today due to eg better technologies and practices, or an example of something inherent to nuclear technology that can never be made safe?
Bringing up unrelated highly controversial topics is not good. It tends to derail threads and accumulate emotionally charged, poorly informed comments.
But anyway, leaks of radioactive materials are inherently much easier to detect than other kinds of leaks because they are radioactive. Every major hospital in the developed world has a radiation safety department or equivalent performing regular leak and contamination testing in association with scintigraphy and brachytherapy, but this has not prevented the widespread use of radionuclides in medicine.
The notion of "contaminat[ing] everything they touch" is also a misconception that the radiation protection community has tried to combat for decades: radiation is only a meaningful hazard insofar as it reaches levels comparable to the natural background radiation produced by 40K, 14C, and other sources pervasive in the natural environment. There is therefore a level of dilution beyond which radioactive contamination ceases to be of meaningful concern, just as is true with all other toxic substances.
Source: as a medical physicist in training, I work with a radiation safety department at a major US hospital.
As someone who is currently in a game of cat and mouse with an intermittent drip from underneath the kitchen sink, this was exactly the first thing that came to my mind also!
I recently played this same cat and mouse game with no success, so I built a better mouse trap using a disposable aluminum foil cooking pan and a Moen water leak sensor. I put the drip pan on a steep angle and bent/reshaped it to collect water at a single point where I placed the sensor. I wrapped the sensor in a small piece of paper towel so that even a single drop of water would be absorbed by the paper towel and trigger the sensor. I tested it with a single drop of water from a syringe, replaced the paper towel to reset the trap, and eventually I got a notification in real time on my phone as it dripped. Over kill? Yes. But it lead to me finally finding the issue.
I had a bathroom sink where we put in a new faucet that had a pinhole leak in the tubing which you couldn't see when installed. Everything would look good, but the water would come out and drip down the drain pipe.
I feel like I would just replace all of it than play cat and mouse. Surely it would be cheaper in time, and low cost until you figure out you have to replace the whole sink.
Even a new vessel need new plumbing to connect it to the vacuum pump (or pumps, sometimes you need one to to go from ambient pressure to low pressure and another to go from low pressure to very low pressure) and the pressure measuring device(s) and also sealing the holes where the wires go (I guess they have some sensor inside the vessel connected to things that are outside). So a brand new vessel means restarting all the seals from zero.
I have replaced the p-trap under sink already, but your comment actually got me thinking maybe it's a leak around the caulk seal where the sink joins the counter or faucets!
My family (avid do-it-yourselfers, who renovated each house we lived in) used to score project size by trips to the hardware store, both proposed/planned/expected, and also actual. :P
