miSci - museum of innovation and science
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2024
3:19 · 107K views · Mar 8, 2012
Archival 1978 Sandia footage testing shipping containers for spent nuclear fuel, including trucks ramming walls, a locomotive hitting a truck-borne cask and a rocket-propelled train crash, plus a fire test.
Cited in nuclear power threads as proof that waste casks survive severe crashes.
4 comments from Hacker News
> Unless one of those plants was in New Orleans or Houston and suffered a Fukishima type meltdown If the nuclear industry were a person, when it built Fukushima it wouldn't have been old enough to drive a car. Today, it would be retired. It learned a thing or two in the intervening years. If Fukushima had been built a mere 2 years later it wouldn't have had its fatal flaw. There are some horrible reactor designs still out there posing a danger to everybody -- but refusing to build new reactors because extremely old reactors were (and still are!) dangerous is... tragic. > if one of the thousands of trucks and rail cars that would be required to ship nuclear waste to centralized storage locations crashed or derailed this video > Unfortunately many of the most ardent supporters of nuclear power downplay (or deny completely) the tangible and serious risks The people who don't take the risks seriously are the people who refuse to perform numerical comparisons and instead make snap judgements on the basis of meltdowns being scary. Other energy sources have risks too. The Banqiao dam makes Chernobyl look tame, but hydroelectric has a squeaky clean rep. Even solar and wind do worse per kWh, because their density is so low that they require (comparatively) tons of install work and upkeep, so the severe slip & fall accidents add up. So yeah, we do care about the tangible and serious risks. We should pay more attention to them. I don't think that calculus points in the direction you think
Have you ever seen a storage Cask used to transport/store nuclear waste after it leaves the pools? How much energy was delivered to the cask when a rocket powered train hit it at 84 mph? this video How much radioactive material was released? Are you aware that in earths distant past there were natural nuclear reactors running? if you go back in time the amount of U235 increases. Go back far enough and you no longer need to "enrich" it to support a nuclear reactor. Care to guess how far the radioactive byproducts from this reactor travelled? Not sure about Ukraines designs, but here (Canada) our reactors can withstand the impact of a fully loaded jet slamming into them. Nothing is invincible, and i suppose if you it it enough you can open it up, but by then it would have been shutdown and had the fuel removed (a unique design of CANDU allows them to be refuled while operating, so you can remove the fuel this way too). you can come up with all sorts of event and wonder if a reactor can survive them, perhaps a meteor strikes it? Perhaps military? Perhaps like Pickering it runs for its entire lifetime and very little happens? There are also facts to consider, coal releases more radiation vs nuclear power plants. if you are concerned about radioactivity you should focus on that?
> My point was the existing solutions people were sure would work still leaked in relatively short time frames. What are you referring to? The aforementioned UF6 canisters were a) NOT designed for long-term holding, more adapted from existing HF storage canisters (you can read some of the fun of storing fluorine compounds in the book "Ignition!" about liquid-fueled rockets), and as mentioned b) high level nuclear waste is vitrified to turn it into a non-volatile, non-dissolving, ceramic material that is largely stable by itself. > ... 30000 years of facility maintenance costs ... There are a variety of unused mines that could house high-level waste; the excavation is already done, thus fairly cheap. We are already factoring in storage of the fuel in casks, because it already is being stored in casks. The missing part is transport (hence the article, which is still kinda silly as the casks were designed to be trucked). If a nuclear waste cask gets hit by planes, trains, or automobiles, not much will happen. [1] If an ordinary tanker car falls off the tracks, it's like an improvised chemical warfare attack. [2] [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
Good thing the people designing the transport casks never thought of that.. you should join their team.. Oh wait.. they did in 1972, and tested the designs? How much energy was delivered to the cask when a rocket powered train hit it at 84 mph? this video How much radioactive material was released? What sort of accident do you propose would deliver more energy vs a train strike at 84mph?