Nuclear Reactors As Art 118
Hemos recommends the coverage over at Wired of a project to digitize nuclear reactor art. "Not all nuclear reactors are built alike. Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants, and configurations, a fact beautifully illustrated by a series of reactor wall charts originally published in issues of Nuclear Engineering International during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, the charts have been lovingly collected by Ronald Knief, a nuclear engineer at Sandia National Laboratory. Recently, he completed his collection... and began to digitize the drawings. The first eight out of more than 100 have now been permanently archived online... 'This is not a CAD/CAM-type thing,' Knief said. 'This really is art.'"
Oblig Simpson's ref (Score:5, Interesting)
I like "Smilin' Joe Fission" - now that's art!
Guangdong plant (Score:4, Interesting)
Is anyone else a bit frightened that the Guangdong plant picture shows what looks to be simple trusses and corrugated aluminum siding over the turbine section, where others use poured concrete and I-beams?
Did they skimp on anything else, I wonder?
The variability is bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Starglider29a asked why they is a lack of uniformity. In the US at least there was no standard design. Each was basically as "one off" because the company that won the contract changed from reactor to reactor. A low bid contract method. This meant each reactor was a "one off".
My understanding is that in France the government commissioned a standard design which it then licensed out. This had some benefits:
1) The design allowed better project management. Everyone knew what needed to be done. This made estimation of effort easier.
2) Due to point #1, each company had a better idea of it took to build a reactor and bid accordingly.
This also helped the costs to be budgeted.
3) Lessons learned from one reactor can be incorporated into the newer, yet to be built, reactors. It is also easier to retrofit older reactors with lessons learned. In short, incremental improvement.
4) Related to pint 3, it is easier to QA a standard design. You know what to expect and if the expectations are not met something is wrong.
Making every reactor a "one off" is crazy. I googled +ISO +"nuclear reactor design" and came up without a comprehensive spec. Having a standard might be a good idea.
Re:Chicken Little (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry to point this out, but you can and it has been done several times. Small nuclear reactors are a useful addition to a nuclear weapons program. Egypt and Indonesia are two nations to ask about that with their "civilian" reactors that produce very little power.
Re:Boiling-Water Reactors? (Score:3, Interesting)
While nucleate boiling does occur in pressurized water reactors, they are referred to as "Pressurized Water Reactors" or PWRs while reactors that employ lower pressure single coolant loops where steam is generated directly from the bulk-boiling of the coolant are referred to as "Boiling Water Reactors" or BWRs. While this might not seem to be a clear separation, among nuclear engineers it is almost universally understood what one means by BWR as opposed to a PWR. A nuclear engineer, nor most people even remotely associated with nuclear power and reactors, would refer to a PWR as a "boiling water reactor" as that would give the impression that they were talking about a very different reactor design and probably make them look foolish. Still, we tend to do it accidentally from time to time.
Also, departure from nucleate boiling is a term that is mostly referred to with regards to PWRs as opposed to BWRs. In a BWR, normal operation requires you move well past nucleate boiling. If you did not then the you would run into a lot of problems. Since the steam that is meant to pass through the turbines is that which is generated by boiling the water flowing through the reactor, you are going to have difficulty producing sufficient steam volume with only nucleate boiling. You also want to get a much higher exit quality (percent steam) in your center channel than you could through nucleate boiling. These two things are important to produce power efficiently and to protect the steam turbines. While steam dryers and separators can do a great job with 10+% saturated steam, but high velocity flows of "wetter" steam could overwhelm them and allow excessive amounts of water droplets into the turbines. Too many water droplets in the turbines equals multi-million dollar blade replacements much sooner. This is why departure from nucleate boiling is not really mentioned much when discussing BWRs. While the transition through the appropriate boiling regimes must be considered when calculating the thermal profile of a reactor, the phrase just doesn't come up. What it is used for is in the discussion of safety limits and accident conditions for PWRs. The maximum DNBR (departure from nuclear boiling ratio) is one of the key thermal limits one imposes on the operation of PWR. It is not however an item of concern when setting those limits for a BWR.