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by ohgodplsno 1344 days ago
Gen III+ reactors are pretty fucking close to meltdown proof.

Any reactor in use today will have a negative void coefficient. Which means, if you don't put power into it, the reaction naturally stops. Then you've got control rods and neutron moderators that will fall back upon the core if there's no power. Then Gen3+ includes a core catcher in which, should it breach its reactor, it just falls in there and cools down.

1 comments

All five large reactor disasters occurred with reactors that also had fail-safes that rendered them theoretically safe. In the case of Three-Mile-Island, unlucky technicians had to work very hard against the reactor's system to sustain the failure.
TMI is a success story. Despite everything that went wrong, the impact to the surrounding population was virtually nil.