The best professional marketing ploys fail to convince many if the product sucks. Or if blows so much hot air, or in this case, radioactive steam, it is seen as risky or entirely unsafe.
Why is a pressure cooker safe enough to be used by anyone at home (not radioactive anyway), and why can I claim nuclear pressure vessels are not safe?
Well, easy: radioactivity aside - by now it is public knowledge that for the boiling water reactors (BWR) in Fukushima, venting failed. Every pressure cooker legally sold today has a safety feature, that the nuclear pressure container has not. By design.
What?
Let's investigate that further. This is first not about the radiation hazard, it is about risks related to mechanical engineering.
Steam boiler safety, circa 1860
Pressure cookers are like small versions of steam boilers, which around 1860 were the high-tech of the era. And like most new technology, people did not understand it, they did not trust it, and - in hindsight - rightly so, because many early generation boilers exploded, killed people and damaged property.
The lessons learned and the boilers that did not explode led to adoption of safety features that steam boilers still have today, among them safety valves to release pessure below the limit where a boiler's structural integrity would be in question.
So we had safety valves for 150 years, but the
nuclear boilers have no safety valves!
By design and by law (in Japan), nuclear boiling water reactors have no automatic safety valves. My understanding, this is mainly because safety valves could lead to uncontrolled release of radioactive steam into the environment.
But what if overpressure builds up and cannot be released? As has happened in Fukushima, venting failed. It may happen in other places for reasons not related to earthquake or tsunami. What if, because of some cooling failure the pressure cooker gets too hot?
Something gives
Structural failure. At the reactor pressure vessel welding seams, along the piping, at valves. And in case of a BWR, this most certainly means release of radioactive steam. Not through a safety valve into a chimney or filter, but through a fatal crack most likely at a place hard to reach and tough to repair.
If you do not believe me, maybe you believe nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen?
Governments who know and understand these risks opt out and in case of Germany and Japan order such unsafe early generation reactors shut down. Marketing spin aside, may people's lives and health win over profits and prestige.
Where am I mistaken? Shout out in the comments.
flickr photo: RELIEF by kellyhogaboom
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