nuclear-news

“The ocean itself can be used as an infinite heatsink,” says Buongiorno. “It’s possible to do cooling passively, with no intervention. The reactor containment itself is essentially underwater.”Another important part of the design is how it would lessen the dangers of decommissioning the plant in fifty years: Rather than undertaking the long, slow process of removing the rods and demolishing the plant, it would be towed “to a central facility, as is done now for the Navy’s carrier and submarine reactors.” If a meltdown occurred, the plant could “vent radioactive gasses underwater” rather than releasing them into the atmosphere and forcing millions to evacuate.

Wouldn’t releasing radioactive gasses underwater also be pretty terrible, environmentally? Why not just stop building nuclear power plants altogether? That’s not really the question these engineers set out to answer. This is about making the plants, whether or not countries chose to build them, safer.

But it’s hard to ignore the extraordinary moral implications of that particular detail. Given the choice between spraying humans with radioactive fumes and spraying the ocean floor, most of us would probably choose the latter. It’s tough to argue with that, but it’s also tough to endorse it. [MIT]