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Training Under Way For New Nuclear Plant Operators In S. Carolina
"Start thinking about getting your tinfoil hat radiation hardened," writes an anonymous reader, and excerpts thus from ABC News: "Southern Co. in Georgia and SCANA Corp. in South Carolina are the first to prepare new workers to run a recently approved reactor design never before built in the United States. Training like it will be repeated over the decades-long lifetime of those plants and at other new ones that may share the technology in years to come. Both power companies are building pairs of Westinghouse Electric Corp. AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta and SCANA Corp.'s Summer Nuclear Station northwest of Columbia, S.C. While the nuclear industry had earlier proposed a larger building campaign, low natural gas prices coupled with uncertainty after last year's disaster at a Japanese nuclear plant have scaled back those ambitions." Getting a new nuclear plant approved is a long haul.
South Carolina has the largest number of nuclear facilities and radioactive waste in the USA.
Washington DC has the largest number of lawyers.
South Carolina won the toss and had first choice.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
According to this article though, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor, Chernyobyl was graphite modulated, and different then a PWR.
It's the first "3rd generation" reactor design to be approved, and is supposed to have much better passive-safety features than previous generations. For example, in a reactor scram, the core would be cooled by a gravity-driven cooling system that works without power.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
On top of the digital controls, it has vastly simpler mechanical and electrical design, yielding significant reductions in the amounts of safety-related piping, cabling, valves, seismic building volume, etc.
Something that should be appreciated, but is seldom mentioned: the design work has been conducted using modern computers and software incorporating vastly improved analytical methods for nuclear, thermal, mechanical, civil, and electrical analysis. The last round of plants built in the US were designed in the 60s and 70s using tools that seem positively ancient by today's standards.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.