*Mistake correction around 3 minutes I should have said neutron instead of proton when talking about Th232!! ►My new Album: madebyjohn.bandcamp.com/album/you-can-have-a-two-computer-family ►My second channel: youtube.com/@madebyjohnmusic?si=60V3gMhRKAjfh0kj ►Instagram: instagram.com/plainly.john/ ►Patreon: www.patreon.com/Plainlydifficult ►Ko-Fi ko-fi.com/plainlydifficult ►Merch: plainly-difficult.creator-spring.com ►Twitter:twitter.com/Plainly_D ►Sources: inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/12/629/12629870.pdf?r=1 www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0311/ML031180806.pdf www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0215/ML021510121.pdf www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0219/ML021920350.pdf onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/piuz.19860170505 inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/29/059/29059899.pdf inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/12/629/12629870.pdf?r=1
hey brother. i figured this is my best chance to let you know how much i love your videos. these are so cool. you do a very fun and intelligent presentation almost like the old history channel videos but fun and its about obscure stuff not stuff we all already watched ten billion videos about.. like chernoble🙄. you are the best man. cheers from baltimore maryland. its pronounced *mare-uh-lind* by the way...
The East german vvr440 reactors at Griefswald is also interesting. Staff destroyed cooling twice. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant
@@PlainlyDifficult I was wondering about that. Proton activation is totally a thing, but it's significantly more difficult due to the magnetic repulsion.
It is more a contamination of highly pressurized gas coming into contact with the Uranium 235 and Uranium 233 (bred from the Thorium), which then got ejected. Didn't a number of TH-camrs recently say, Thorium is a great material to reactivate any old Uranium, so that we can get much more out of it, and that it would be totally safe? Of course not with this graphite technology which is prone to accidents (Windscale, Tchernobyl), it will be totally safe (Three Mile Island) [/sarcasm]. I really wonder how this is meant to work...
Oh wow this is near me. Due to work i always drive past there on the A2 and even nowadays without the THTR cooling tower, that powerplant always mesmerizes me
@@zh84 Yes, it took until 2002 before it was surpassed by a cooling tower at Niederaussem Power Station, also in Germany. It still holds the record for the tallest cooling tower constructed out of steel, and the tallest cooling tower of any kind that has ever been demolished.
I live in Germany. The accident is actually unknown to the general Public. The escaped radiation was detected by universities and people who bought or built radiation detectors due to the Chernobyl incident. But this radiation was blamed on Chernobyl. As far as the general public knew, the deadly Chernobyl cloud had arrived and Germany had never, ever any nuclear accidents. Back then, my favorite Computer magazine even had published schematics and programs to monitor radiation using your Commodore 64. What had really killed the German nuclear industry was Fukusima. 3 months before that incident, our Chancellor Angela Merkel had said something like "She as a physicist had done some calculations and came to the conclusion that German nuclear power plants are perfectly safe!". A month after the incident, she had recalculated and came to the conclusion that nobody could claim that nuclear power plants could be perfectly safe.
I am original from Germany and I had never heard of it until this video. What killed the German nuclear industry was Chernobyl and the author Gudrun Pausewang, who‘s nuclear doomsday propaganda novels for teenagers were a mandatory read in schools for many years starting in the late 80s and traumatized entire generations. Added to this the nuclear fear of the Pershing missile crisis in Germany in the 80s there was a wide spread anti-nuclear mainstream already established in the 90s and 00s. Fukishima then was the nail in the coffin for the public opinion and politics took shutting down all plants as an easy win the public opinion.
@@AquaMarin-ww3qxfunny how different countries propagandized students. When I was a kid in the 60s in the USA, desks were considered "cover" for fallout.
Which shows she was politician first and a scientist a very distant second. Changing your "science" according to your emotions makes one a very poor scientist.
I just watched a vid last night from WATOP & he mentioned that. It was a sad vid about all the old villages like Old Manhein torn down & even graves relocated to dig up a special coal called lignite. The vid is titled This Is Crazy. That's Why Germany Ended Up So Deep Underground. My Great, great & maybe 1 more great Grampa was a Frick from Bavaria. Who moved to Indiana in 1840. I'm a Beyer & live in Wyoming.
I always get so happy when PlainlyDifficult finds a new nuclear incident to report on. Those were the videos that initially got me to subscribe, but I’ve grown to love all of his content. As a proponent of nuclear energy, I’m always interested in the way he deconstructs and explains these problems. If we just used nuclear alongside renewables (solar, wind, hydroelectric) we could offset global warming by a lot. It’s important to educate the public regarding nuclear since now it’s essentially synonymous with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Issue is, Nuclear can not work together with renewables at all, this is why Spain shutting down all Reactors middle of Spring and turning them on again in Late Autunum. To mutch Solar, another issue is the not mine enough Uranium, by 2030 the have a staying warning there will by not enough Uranium, avaible to fuel all of them, well could by earlier as this. Third one look at france, how often they have energy Crisis because the Nuclear Plants failing again. This is why Spain, Belgium, Germany and co decided to drop nuclear power. In a way of Irony france
The problem is, if a conventional power plant goes totally berserk, it might cause mayhem in the vicinity. If a nuclear power plant does so, the damage is first invisible, then often continuing over a span of decades or even generations. The only contenders to this amount of hazard are chemistry plants and waste management companies, especially if the latter provide their services for the former. Talking about waste: Is there any final storage place in the world, for nuclear waste? One that doesn't need to be cooled constantly?
@@gabbyn978instead of nuclear, we then burn coal in huge coal powerplants that release loads of toxic compounds. And these power plants are incredibly dangerous in comparison to nuclear. Far more die each and every single year from coal power plants than the people who died from all nuclear accidents added together.
There is another flaw with the reactor. The reason for the high level of radioactive dust inside is that nobody had anticipated that constantly poking a ball pit with rods could scrape off material. The control rods had damaged the balls. The incident would not have happened if the balls were not damaged due to this design flaw. The radioactive material was supposed to be contained inside the balls. The airlock was meant to be a second line of defense - not to be the primary and only line of defense against the leaking of radiation.
@@limes5295 I believe the idea was that graphite on graphite causes very little friction. But, well... 🤷Someone involved in the AVR described it as: "The pellets go in shaped like balls, and come out not shaped like balls." The whole project - including the AVR which was built at the site of a research institute - was financed not by scientific grants, but by industry money. So I guess there was a lot of pressure to "make it work", or at least pretend that it works, no matter what.
@@ahoannon5711 it wasn't graphite on graphite, balls were coated with silicon carbide, which is supposed to be wear resistant. But it's also brittle and inner pressure of gaseous fission products could tear it apart.
well for sure the control rods slide within pipes. would make no sense otherweise. but there is abrasion everywhere just by the balls sliding along each other. plus this "safest fuel of the earth" multiplies the amount of waste, by it being embedded in tons of radioactve carbon. crazy design.
Many thanks for the video, John! Your documentary style couples disasters with a slightly light-hearted approach and your graphics are signature now. Straight and to the point. Cheers!
Ohh, I used to live near there. At Keitstraße 31! I took several measurements in the area and the radiation actually rises to mSivert in some places, at least according to my Geiger counter. How great that you made something out of my surroundings. Thank you very much. The best thing is that when I asked if it was possible to take a tour of the reactor and its building in the current state, despite the secure lockdown, I received an answer from the operator: We do not operate deactivated or active nuclear power plants. ' When I then said that this was interesting and then wrote the reactor with its type and address and that the press might be interested in the fact that it had been forgotten, especially as it had been involved in such a serious accident, I was contacted from a very high level in a very very friendly manner.
@@jed-henrywitkowski6470The highest radiation concentration I measured was at the gate to the small cooling towers. Where the 2 small ones and the middle one stood. They have now also been demolished. Not yet at that time. That's when my Geiger counter went off. Also at the bridge you have to go under if you want to get to the power station.
Are you sure you are talking about MILLIsievert? I have been several times to Chornobyl and just at very local certain points i was able to exceed 1000 Microsieverts per hour ( which equals 1 Millisievert). Grüße aus der Jülicher Ecke, wo es auch einen Kugelhaufenreaktor gibt/gab ;).
Took me, an American, a few seconds to catch the "Cockneys of Europe" joke, and when I did I lol'd unashamedly. Thank you for the video! Your work is always nicely researched, understandable, and humorous without being disrespectful. This video did indeed have many many balls. More lol's. Thanks again!
As someone highly interested in the Chernobyl disaster and growing up only about 100 miles from this particular reactor, I am surprised I had never heard of this disaster! The German nuclear power plants that didn't get axed back then ended up getting closed in a post-Fukushima Pavlov reaction.
It was not a disaster and that is why you did not hear. Government agencies know how to play human FEAR, if they tell you early then it might be too late if they don't tell you then they know they have been wasting your money.
Tbf, it can hardly be considered a disaster, but rather an 'industrial accident' with no effect on public health. The estimated additional radiation dose for the public in the vicinity was less than 0.01 mSv, which is negligible compared to the natural background radiation (about 2-3 mSv/year in Germany). By comparison, a chest X-ray involves a dose of about 0.1 mSv, while a transatlantic flight can expose you to approximately 0.05 mSv."
Some nuclear engineer somewhere said, "Chernobyl was bad and all, but let's see just how many moving parts we can stuff into one of these things!" and thus was this ridiculously complicated gumball-machine-of-death created.
Chernobyl's meltdown happened just days before this incident, so it could not have been in the minds of the designers or builders of the German reactor. It _should_ have been (and probably was) on the minds of the people running the plant day to day, but to what degree that would lead to screwing up worse rather than self-correcting is hard to say.
Thorium was actually the front runner in the race for fueling the first nuclear reactors. It did however have one major drawback, it didn't produce weapons grade materials as a by product.
You can make weapons grade in a thorium reactor, it's just harder to do. The Manhattan Project was trying to build nuclear explosives as quickly as possible.
Of course it did. The fuel in the thorium cycle is U-233, which is said to be just as good a material as Pu-239, based on the minimal testing with U-233 warheads. But it does require some extra steps to make.
The key word here is *Balls* a very English sort of reference, which can cover a number of final outcomes. These are cycled up and down, removed when damaged or the fuel is not reactive enough. *Graphite* is a very soft material, while Thorium and Uranium are hard. Imagine making 2-inch diameter balls, using gypsum powder, aka “Plaster of Paris,” (PoP) interspersed with heavy chunks of metal, then sending these through a conveyer-belt system that slowly grinds them together, in a continuous process that has NOT miraculously suspended friction coefficients nor the Delta Vee of inertia/mass differential. Any short “Drop” would act upon the materials differently, eventually breaking these balls apart. Even without this particular operator error, *bad things* would eventually happen! As Clarkson would say, just before one of his hare-brained schemes blew up in his face on *Top Gear* “What could possibly go wrong”? 😂😂😂😂😂
When operated above 800C the graphite is annealed and becomes much stronger. This feature was discovered over 40 years ago...lessons learned by nuclear incidents at that time in experimental test reactors. In addition, the recent (TRISO, or TRISO-X) 6cm pebbles have added other silicon coverings that protect the soft graphite from operational damage. These fuel pebbles have been under development since the 1950s and are recently much safer.
AVR shown many of the problems - while it irradiated people walking by because shielding is not needed on the top - but they went ahead anyway. One reason why the anti nuclear movement was and is so strong in Germany was the constant stream of fuckups and coverups happening. That there are also leucemia clusters around two power plants certainly did not help.
@@Carlos-im3hnImho they should have already been safe in 1986, as there had been ample time to fix the issue. Also, how do you make sure that the material will not become changed, or even brittle over time? Radiation is nothing to trifle with.
@@methanbreather I know of the increased number of leucemia cases around Brunsbuettel and Kruemmel. The problem is: It is very hard to link them to the nuclear plants. There are radioactive sources everywhere around you, like the granite cobblestones in your market place, or the Radon that had accumulated in the basement; even cigarettes contain radioactive substances. I don't mean that it is impossible that the nuclear power plants had an effect on the kids, only that it is impossible to prove the connection beyond any doubt.
For a nuclear incident, this seems extremely minor. I almost feel like the German government was just looking for excuses to ditch nuclear power. Probably a combination of the fossil fuel lobby and Chernobyl anxiety.
@@aircraftcarrierwo-class It also really never was used in the debate about nuclear power in Germany. The last nuclear reactors in Germany were taken offline in the beginning of 2023, so I do not know why he claims that this reactor incident contributed to the decisions taken against nuclear power. It is also very unknown in Germany, basicially nobody in the general public talks about this incident. Source: I'm German
I haven't checked the data again but I think German electricity wasn't actually so dependent on Russian gas. Rather, Germany burned a lot of domestic lignite. Russian gas was more required for heating and many chemical processes. Electricity was just a very small part of the usage of Russian gas.
Yes, their mines started encroaching on villages. And lignite coal is the dirtiest form of coal. They also speed built floating gasification plants on the coast to import LNG from other countries, AND kept the last reactors online 4 months past their shutdown dates cause they needed the power.
Yes, the share of imported gas used in power plants is only around 13% right now. And its share in the electric primary energy was never that high anyway, somewhere in the 12% to 17% band over the last three decades if I remember correctly. Natural gas plants were needed in the "nuclear age" anyway to compensate for load changes. Nuclear plants can only change their output very slowly while gas plants are the most flexibility. So back then they were needed as major plants were not flexible enough, now they are needed to compensate renewables volatility. Until we get more scalable storage than the few pump storage water plants we have, and better ways to balance supply and demand on the demand side, too. Which are both finally becoming technically viable now ...
@@hartmutholzgraefe There is yet another on-demand kind of power plant, the pumped-storage hydroelectricity. But there are only so many slopes on which you can place thesre devices. Edit: no, energy storage via the lifting of concrete blocks on ropes won't count for me. There hasn't even been a pilot project that would prove that such a construction can deal properly with wind gusts or earthquakes, so it is out of the question.
Fukushima Daiichi was a near miss. What's telling is the continuous downplaying of the issue and the patently false claims by the nuclear supporters. (I've read the internal NRC comms transcripts and the email trails BTW - if you are thinking of educating (gaslighting) me about 'truth' or something )
@@rwerk66 "false claims" Like the fact that chernobyl is one of the only nuclear failures which resulted in a big amount of loss of life and issues due to completely incompetence? Because thats not false at all... You think you're so smart but the entire fukushima incident is documented and available to the itnernet so no clue what you mean with "internal NRC and email trails" but you keep gaslighting yourself. Even with Fukushima there was a fair bit of incompetence and corruption present. Mostly from the goverment and power company themselves trying to cover this up. Luckily it was less devestating then chernobyl Nuclear power has by FAR the least lethality out of any and all ways of creating energy and so far even with chernobyl the least impact on the worlds environment.
@@krashd It wasn't ever close to having a much worse outcome. For a while there was concern that the core melt in Unit 1 had nearly breached secondary containment. In reality it had eaten through less than 1/4 of the 2.6 m of concrete.
That is possibly the least disastrous disaster you have ever shown us. I agree it seems an over reaction. Fossil fuel coal burning is also fraught with health implications.
Especially browncoal/lignite. About 300 times the amount of health complications and deaths per TWh than nuclear. And yes, that statistic includes Chernobyl and Fukushima. Coal is still 300 times worse.
I've found the pebble bed design of reactor to be really interesting for a while, and yet this wasn't a failure point that I knew about. In theory the PBR is a high efficiency self-regulating reactor with a constant online cycle as it doesn't need to be shut down for fueling. Now the reason for using a lot of tennis ball sized fuel elements rather than the usual rods was in for safety. The machine is supposed to be self regulating, due to the mechanical properties of the pebble's. Each ball is flexible, and can expand when heated - which moves the fuel particles farther apart, slowing the reaction. (Much like the negative void coefficient of a well designed BWR reactor, but without the complication of handling phase changes). Using a gas coolant has assorted advantages in handling and heat capacity for thermal efficiency. Conversely - the fuel balls were also the weak point of the design. Traditional fuel rods are sintered metal in a ceramic casing, inside a metal tube. PBR elements are quite fragile by comparison, as they needed to expand and contract. They would rub together and create dust, crack, or shatter, and in turn could become stuck in places. Apparently trying to encase uranium in stuff that has the mechanical properties of pencil lead was a bit messier than originally thought.
Also, moving pebbles tend to settle down in a tighter configuration, which makes (re)moving single pieces difficult. Fill a glass with uncooked rice, stick a knife into the rice, shake the glass for a while, and you can lift the glass by pulling the knife handle up. This effect is especially strong with oblong elements, but in principle valid for everything that is made of many small roundish objects (ground liquefaction when an earthquake occurs). That reminds me: The Rhine Valley has experienced quakes up to a magnitude of four (breaking turrets off the Dome of Cologne)
@@gabbyn978 Of course that begs the question of if they could have the coolant flowing up at high pressure so they can have a fluidized bed pebble bed reactor... Probably not, but now I'm going to singing "I can't get no - liquefaction" like the rolling stones all day.
Just a moment of appreciation for the wonderful 3/4 of a second dramatic pause between 'Which leads us on to The Disaster' and... 'The Disaster'. Ah, as if any hope was still possible :D
as a german, i see it the same as you. the government shouldn´t have phased out the clean nuclear energy and instead using dirty expensive fossil fuels. was a bad choice
Been following you from the beginning man. Me and my family love the content. Keep up the phenomenal work and know that every video teaches someone something new 👏👏👏. Thanks.
3:09 The only defining property of an element is it's number of protons. Change that, and you change the element to something else. If you add a proton to thorium it becomes protactinium. You change an elements isotope by adding or subtracting neutrons, never protons. I think he meant to add a neutron which then decays into being another protron, becoming protactinium.
@@krashd Yes. A neutron is slightly more massive than a proton and when absorbed into an unstable nucleus it can decay, becoming a proton thus changing that element into the next one up on the table of elements. At least that's my basic uneducated understanding
Philippsburg went on after the 1983 incident (damaged fuel rods released radioacive matierial, radioactive Iodine-131 got into the environment), until 2019
@@itcanwait To power a data centre I think, supposedly by 2030 almost a quarter of all electricity generated in the world will be used for the internet. That's one huge feedbag for a rogue AI 🤣
“Experienced a whoopsie just a short period after the old bugger up” This is the content I come here for. Seriously though, this is the only channel my brain hasn’t got bored of after a year.
Really good primer on thorium and pebble bed reactors in this video. It sounds like there were some odd 'we didn't consider this possible risk' engineering flaws in the THTR series, like the fact there didn't seem to be very many safeguards against radioactive vapors getting into parts of the system where they weren't supposed to be.
This reactor was kind of an experiment, to check out new technologies. Turned out, it is more difficult to handle than they had imagined. This path was no longer followed.
@gabbyn978 not with this architecture at least. Pebble reactors are still being pursued almost entirely due to regulatory constraints. Pebbles are a halfway point between the now technologically capped solid fuel reactor and the much more desirable liquid fuel reactor. And while on the technical side it makes it inherit the worst traits of both reactor types, it does make it ironically an easier thing to license and lowers the collaterals you need to pay to even be allowed to build it. It also makes it considerably easier to utility companies that can still leverage exclusive fuel contracts like they have with solid fuels. Pebbles can be made to only fit in a certain reactor type, and thus it allows the fuel producers to raise the price of fuel without consequences. Meanwhile a liquid fuel blend can be made by just about anyone and it isn't form factor constrained which means all the fuel providers would be in competition for the first time, driving down the cost of nuclear fuel and therefore the profit of these companies.
One thing about the view of nuclear power in germany is also the publishing of the novel Die Wolke (called Fall-out in its english translation) that came out in 87 and became part of a lot of school curricula, which deals with a theoretical catastrophic reactor meltdown in germany. Also as someone who grew up in a town with a uranium enrichment plant, that was also not very popular locally. Add to that constant news stories about the mishandling and question of storing nuclear waste, there’s definitely a lot of points there. So instead cities are getting destroyed to dig for more coal
I live not far away from the small AVR reactor that tested this technology in Jülich. They also had a lot of incidents and even a very close call that could have been the real German Chernobyl. They have Graphite in a core at very high temperature. The reactor was run by absolute fanboys of this technology and they lied a lot about problems and dangers that come with it. They later had to admit that it was impossible to even measure the actual temperature in the core. They used test balls with a very simple way to measure the maximum temperature but they came thru maxed out and they decided to continue not knowing how far above the designed temperature the thing was running. Also the number of balls that came out broken was much higher then expected. The fact that just during Chernobyl something had happened and they kept it secret was of course unacceptable and at this time the whole concept of the THTR300 was already proven to be to expensive and not capable to achieve the promised features. It was sold to the public as high temperature generator that is capable to produce high temperatures not just for electric power but for industrial use like steal production. It was already clear that this wasn't going to happen and it was obvious that this technology was to complicated for electrical energy only.
@@gabbyn978 Graphite in combination with hot nuclear reactions is calling for trouble. I think the piles in Windscale are still waiting to get dismantled. Only the idea to cool the reactor with sodium is even worse. Gives a nice explosion in case of a fire or flooding if something happens. This German reactor was never fueled up and transformed into an amusement park (Wunderland Kalkar).
@@gabbyn978 Windscale was also being operated at FAR higher energy levels than originally intended, and even higher than was needed to anneal the graphite moderator. They were trying to make enough tritium to qualify for US help in making hydrogen bombs.
@@Ulrich.Bierwisch They did start working on Windscale a few years ago. Keep in mind that they followed General Procedure #1 when it comes to nuclear accidents: Can we just seal this up and let it sit while it cools off? They waited so long to start working on the interior of Windscale because they could just seal it up and let the radioactives slowly burn themselves away. Now, the stuff inside is far less dangerous than it was just after the accident. (This was also the basic plan for Chernobyl at the time, and it's a good one: If you can keep the radioactive materials from escaping, the safest thing to do is let the stuff burn itself out. Once most of the really nasty stuff is gone, it's far easier to clean up.)
There’s also Australia’s Chernobyl, but instead of radiation, it’s asbestos. The entire town of Wittenoom is contaminated with blue asbestos, which was mined nearby. We still have the highest mesothelioma rates in the world because of it
I love waking up and learning about some new disaster while I make breakfast 😭❤️ genuinely ty for making these videos, the quality and research that goes into them in unmatched
I've always been fascinated by this design, and had no idea that it had already had a (quite ill-fated) test. Thanks, educational and humorous as always: you're what TH-cam is all about!
I stayed in Germany in the 70s and the whole nuclear power program was controversial. Atomkraft Nein Danke stickers were everywhere and it seemed every younger person wore a badge. It's one of the reasons why the Green movement became so powerful there.
Germans never understood nuclear power. I have met people who seriously believe that reactors can explode like bombs, and that the accident in Chornobyl was a nuclear explosion. Meanwhile the proponents of nuclear power don't care either; they just use it as a vehicle to shame the government, even though this government wasn't the one who decided to phase out nuclear power before phasing out coal. For somebody fascinated by nuclear physics and the engineering that goes into such plants, it's like watching two bands of monkeys throwing poo at each other.
For the life of me, I do not understand anti-Nuclear so-called "Green" politics. Renewable generation sources aren't -- and won't be for a while -- capable of meeting our energy needs. By opposing nuclear generation, you end up supporting fossil fuel as a consequence. Humans are truly geniuses, aren't we.
@@NeovanGoth I doubt anyone who isn't particularly interested in the inner workings of a nuclear power plant (= the majority of the population), would know that a meltdown is not the same as a nuclear explosion...So why specifically accuse Germans lmao
That whole design never should have got off the ground. I think engineers get so wrapped up in solving a challenge, they lose sight of the fact this is a bad idea. Thorium is good. This reactor just has too many complicated places to fail. 😢
Reliance on fan driven helium sounds like a trouble point waiting to happen. Light water reactors seem like they're a lot more manageable when trouble emerges.
The concept of this one was that they could always release the ball pit into an emergency chamber below where the balls would be spread out sufficiently to mostly stop further reactions ... as far as I remember ...
@@luelou8464 I know the UK also built some liquid metal cooled fast reactors. Or, at least one. A plutonium breeder reactor. And if they could get the public acceptance required to put the entire set of facilities in one place so you never had to ship stuff like spent fuel between sites, we'd essentially eliminate all the transport issues in nuclear power.
Seriously? Who the heck thought pinball ciche would look good on a breeder reactor, ive noticed that basically all reactor incidents are the result of poorly designed mechanical systems.
The Libyans thought pinball machine parts looked preeeety good, even thought they passed for a nuclear weapon. How do you think he got the plutonium for the Delorean?
Simply for the science of it all, and how freakin' cool it is, have you ever done something on Earth's own, natural nuclear reactor they found in Gabon? I believe it's the only time we've ever discovered such a phenomenon.
The Pebble Bed reactor was almost designed to fail. One they were trying two brand new never before tried technologies together which is never a good thing. Second The Pebble Bed Reactor control scheme was essentially like a vending machine. The Pebble Bed reactor relied on ball handling paths whose reliability was tenuous at best. In fact it was a ball handling error that crashed the system. Also the high hard minimum add ball limit prevented any granular adjustment of the system if needed. The manual add system added human fault to a system that had few redundant fault tolerant safety systems. This is essentially a rube-Goldberg reactor design destined to fail. Human Arrogance led to this disaster.
"vending" machine should be "Pachinko" machine with the 6cm pebbles falling down slowly in the reactor among other control pebbles among dynamic control rods.
That whole 'testing two brand new technologies together' thing is probably a result of a severely stretched research budget which is 'expected' to produce results. Trying to achieve massive breakthroughs on the cheap is always dangerous.
@@momon969 Yes these are all complex. The new GenIV pebble bed reactors hopefully have addressed all the issues after 60 years of development. The new GenIV designs have many passive and other automated controls to avoid many (and hopefully all) issues.
This has to be one of the worst, weirdest reactor designs yet. Its like trying to make a boat out of ping pong balls and then declaring all boats are terrible once it sank.
That was my immediate reaction too 😂 Then I considered the fact that I know just enough german to break it back into the less-daunting component words.
Are Bites Geh Mine Shaft Fair Sooks Reactor Would be an imperfect pronunciation guide for rainy, south-east corner of London accents. (Working Group on Experimental Reactors)
@@LongPeter Actuelly, Gruppe and Group are meaning the same, add an e to the end, and you are good. And the mine shaft is a Grube, so totally a different thing. Related to 'graben' which means 'to dig'
Hate when people see anything nuclear related and immediately say “we should just use thorium it’s cheaper and safer!” like just say you watched that one Sam o Nella video and that’s it
You already mentioned my suggestion somewhat in this video. If you have A LOT of free time, you could look into the HTR of the AVR Jülich (AVR or as you tried to call it: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor). It had some accidents and some releases into the environment. It's hard to find though because they covered a lot of stuff up, but there must be a report somewhere from an independent commission from a few years ago.
AVR had plenty of issues, like those fuel balls very often disintegrating. But what it's mostly remembered for is lacking overhead shielding... Some bright spark decided that nuclear radiation couldn't do any damage just being radiated into space, so why bother shielding the roof? Just make sure no rain gets in, good enough for a government contract. Planes weren't allowed anywhere nearby anyway, and birds should be fast enough not to get TOO much radiation. So they started experiments, and all went fine... Until the weather changed, and thick clouds happened to come in. Suddenly radiation detectors went off everywhere... Turns out clouds can reflect ionizing radiation. Oops...
These pebble reactors are really a great concept, but just like everything else.... When it works, it's awesome! When it does not work, it might have an almost incomprehensible negative impact. You just have to look at the glowing silver lining.
Thorium reactors work, but this desigh is not smart. On the level of US "homogenus" reactor in the 1950s. Fuel prone to damage is thrown around, bad transport and sealing of the system. Why? German habit of complicating things i presume.
Chernobyl aside, I think there were other factors at play as well: Pretty much the whole Western nuclear power generation economy runs on uranium fuel rods, so a new player with a different and moreso a national technology plus relatively cheap fuel meant competition. Yes, the little oopsie wasn´t exactly good press, but the problems had been resolved, the reactor could have run on.
On broken graphite? Who can guarantee that this would not have happened in the main chamber either, as the control rods were poking through tons of graphite balls all the time?
Reading on Wikipedia, planning of the THTR-300 reactor already started in 1966, before the experiments at the AVR test reactor were even complete. This meant that the THTR-300 design could not even take all of the results of the experiments conducted at the test reactor into consideration. In 1971 one of the construction companies (part of Krupp) pulled out of the contract because their management after seeing the final results from the AVR test reactor lost confidence in the pebble bed reactor design. The remaining companies still continued the THTR-300 project because they wanted a design to compete with the then new light-water reactors. So this whole project was ill-fated right from the start...
I live in the Region around this Reactor, amd I've heard the rumour that radioactive gas had been released from the facility into the Tschernobyl cloud - so this video verifies it! The plant is now powered by fossil fuels😅 but the cooling towers still can be observed from my backyard
Kinda hard to hide radioactive material releases of any size, as many people/organizations outside of government have detectors and understand how to use them.
@@seanworkman431 When you address people as if they're idiots, it mostly reveals your own insecurity. I'm not even going to spent time on my background and knowledge when it comes to radiation issues. My comment was aimed at the unfortunate tendency of governments, corporations, etc. to keep secrets.
@@lizblock9593 mate, I had a friend that spent 6 years at university to become an engineer and when he got his 'big break' he called me up and asked me how to do it. I do not give a flying F about your emotions, if you are an idiot the rest of the community should be warned so the dumb F doesn't start mking stupid decisions. Do an IQ test and get back to me.
When I was watching you explain how that system worked, I said to myself that such a complicated system of feeding, circulating, and removing the fuel balls was doomed to fail. Way too complicated.
yeah sounds overly complicated. Though the actual accident I'd say is not caused by that system's complexity, but by the feeding mechanism being poorly designed. At least as explained in this video, it first seems stupid that you have an automated loading mechanism that can't load the precise amounts needed. Worse is that for the manual procedure, there seem to have been little fail safe in place to prevent you from accidentally venting radioactive gas. It should've been impossible to just open the release valve when radioactive gas might've made it into that chamber without overriding a good number of blinking red lights and "are you sure?" popup equivalents. And/or it would seem wise to me to have a geiger counter at the release tubes that blares alarms to the operators, or automatically shuts the valve on its own, if radioactive gas being vented is detected.
yes, far too complex for a simple human operator to identify and avoid all the failure mechnisms "on the spot" in real-time with an operational reactor. Humans design these and need to avoid or mitigate many latent failure modes _before_ becoming operational.
You don't have one in your vicinity, do you? If a country is barely more than half the size of Texas, yet has nearly 85 million people living in it, and 23 locations of nuclear power plants, all distributed over major river valleys, there remains no place that is further away from such a facility than ten miles, except maybe some mountain villages. Imagine to live there, not knowing what is going on inside the buildings, or if the concrete is still in good condition.
@ I am close to Sizewell and it’s 3 plants and I’m fine with that. Chernobyl required gross misconduct to initiate and quite frankly Fukushima required gross incompetence at the design FMEA stage to make happen. I am much more concerned about the us airbases close by now sleepy joe wants to bequeath the world a doomsday to remember him by.
@@robinwells8879 Japan is a first world country, scarred by the experience of a nuclear explosion (a real nuclear explosion, not this hydrogen reaction that blew the roofs off of Fukushima Daichi), and yet this did happen. Why? Because they could not figure that a magnitude nine quake would render their elaborate controls inoperable. You may call this an instance of negligence. But no one had believed that such a thing would be possible. Like the mysterious freak waves that had been considered a sailor's yarn for centuries until one hit an oil rig platform and left an unmistakable mark. Regarding Biden: Maybe I have no idea about Joes politics, but I never had the impression that he is a real falcon. He was responsible for the safety of this country, and that's it. Anyway, you don't have to worry about him for long. I wonder what is coming next. An eight ball?
@@robinwells8879Suffolk? I'm in Norfolk! I'm happy Sizewell C is going ahead. To be fair to Fukushima, the power plants were destroyed by the quake and tsunami, a very unpredictable event that cannot be controlled 😢
You could make a follow up Video on the AVR Jülich which has nearly blown up. And had multiple incidents that released harmful amounts of radiation parcely due to missing shielding.
The real question is what happened to the other 299 versions of the previous THTR? Did the nuclear engineers finally decide they found 299 ways not to make a nuclear actor? 😂
13:22 Should have been a zero ... the reactor had a interface loss of coolant directly into the environment, a serious accident in light water reactors ... but with helium as coolant and the uranium bound in TRISO fuel only so minimal traces of activity escaped that nobody really cared ... it was such a great reactor concept, core-melt-immune and safe, that now China builds them after getting the techonolgy practically for free from Germany.... and here in Germany, the kWh in November costs 80 cent ... 😢
Tbh I think 1 is correct, not because of the actual issues though. That is to say as you point out the actual event itself should be a 0, but the actual impact and ramifications of the event make it a meaningful event if only politically.
@@-allround- yeah, coal ash is super radioactive and we produce over 10million tons of it per year. Meanwhile, the entire amount of spent fuel radioactive waste we've ever produced is less than 20k tons and would easily fit into a small Turnhalle.
I dont know who is your provider...but a quick check at lets say check 24 should give you a better deal. Somewhere between 30-40 cents kw/h is the avarage.
Sad that entire industries, particularly one using thorium can be ground to a halt by such minimal occurrences like this incident and Three Mile Island. Particularly ironic when you consider last year in the US alone, 470 /died/ in the petroleum industry.
@@gabbyn978 why yes, high temperatures did result in corium production as one would expect. However, the vast majority of the melt was contained within the pressure vessel of the reactor and none of it escaped the biological shield. Further, the release of radiation to the surrounding area was minimal. All that being said, the safety features of American nuclear reactors have only gotten better in the past forty years. The minimal /exposure/ which occurred in 1979 was blown entirely out of proportion.
@@dragonboi20 People just don't get it. Three Mile Island was a massive fuck up on the part of the human operators, largely due to the control and computer interfaces turning out to be crap. AND THE INDUSTRY LEARNED THE LESSONS AND DESIGNED VASTLY BETTER INTERFACES. And so did other industries, too.
There is a shut down nuclear power plant in Lubmin, Germany, then the largest power plant in the entire GDR (AKW Greifswald). Anyone can book a tour there and a very nice and old tour guide who actually used to work there and is very knowledgeable about this stuff will show you around the place and actually INTO a core itself, because there is a core that was built to about 80% when the nuclear decommissioning started in Germany. This means that core never saw water nor fuel, so it's not a hazard whatsoever. I have been there and it was probably to coolest fucking thing on the earth! Everything is out of stainless steel, even the walls! The effort and size of it is something everyone should experience in my opinion. And it's a guided tour group of only about 15 people, which I find very tragic.
The Greifswald NPP reactors in operation had a substantial problem: the WWER reactor cores had too little insulating water between the outer fuel rods and the core drums. Thus, the radiation from the reaction made the steel brittle. By 1989, there were reports that said "unless the core drums are fixed, operation is risky and I'll-advised". As the WWER were typically less secure than the West-German EPR reactors, it was no hassle to put Greifswald NPP out of operation. Over 35 years later, the decontamination and teardown of the site is still going on.
@@CranialMalfunction The problem could be fixed with annealing the reactor vessel after a couple of years. This has been done on both blocks of Bohunice V-1 in Slovakia. The reactors and entire control system as well as the plant were inspected by western experts and the conclusion was that the plant is on equal safety operational level as similarly old reactors of "western" design (you can find an IAEA report on that). However, it had to shut down because of Austria, as they would block Slovakia to enter the EU if those blocks were not shut down. It was a political decision. Same as with Greifswald. Especiall the case of Block 5 and Block 6 which had the newer design (as Bohunice V-2) that is still operating in other power plants and will do so for the coming decades. The decision to close NPP Greifswald was a political one, as the reactors were perfectly safe in their time. Especially 5 and 6 could safely run today and produce clean electricity. There are many reactors of the VVER 440/213 type operating today and there have been never any accidents with this type. New reactor based on the VVER 440/213 are being built too. See NPP Mochovce block 3 and 4. Block 3 went into commercial production one year ago and Block 4 is expected to come online soon. Both are expected to operate into the 21st century. Practically, Greifswald Block 5 to 8 (if finished) could operate safely until the 2080s. But no, Germany decided to burn coal instead. Great move.
I was in there. Verry nice! (and it is free :-) ) Block 6 is it. Block 1 to 5 where used to produce energy. Block 5 only a few weeks. Block 1 and 2 did also heat the city Greifswald. The powerpland also owns his own raliway. (moving the personal between city and NPP)
@erikziak1249 Erm... Nah. By 1989, there were internal reports (even West German companies were hired to evaluate the degradation of the reactor core hulls) stating that the older reactor core vessels are becoming too brittle due to the impacts of fast neutrons. These reports and material analysis concluded that the core drums could break if large amounts of cold water had to be pumped into the reactor, e.g. during a critical leakage.
Is there a spot on the bingo card, probably the free space "human overrides the automatic controls"? Smh, I swear every single "accident" was someone doing so
Not always, but it was a critical art of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The difference is, Three Mile Island's PASSIVE systems still contained the accident, while Chernobyl's didn't.
I don't think this contributed much to the German Nuclear exit. There are significantly larger scandals and events that have happened inside and outside of Germany.
I always assumed you worked in Health and Safety, I wouldnt have guessed sound engineering. Also, for a second I thought you were calling the chicken an idiot with a sound engineering degree.
"Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor" translates to "joint venture test reactor". It was the first prototype of an high temperature reactor (HTR) and it was specifically meant to test this new type of reactor and its quirks. The later THTR-300 is based on the AVR's design but was scaled up to a commercial production level and had improvements that fixed faults which came to light in prior tests on the AVR (namely the layout of pipes which meant the AVR's core would be exposed to water if a pipe broke, that's why the pipes of the steam generator are shifted to the side in the THTR-300).
The Shippingport plant in Pennsylvania actually operated for a portion of its life with a thorium "seed" blanket as a breeder reactor and was successful in generating more fuel than it consumed.
Well there are a lot more reasons German stopped using nuclear power. For example German doesn't have a place to put spent fuel or to refine spent fuel to use it again. Also it's a rather labor intensive way of producing electricity. Solar, wind and storage are now the cheapest ways of producing electricity in Germany, and since the electricity market is kinda broken, it makes sense to produce your own power whenever you can. If you are lucky you get 8 cents per kWh for giving away your power, and have to buy it for 30-40 cents per kWh. In fact domestic battery storage is now 5 times as high as commercial one.
@@brylozketrzyn They had cleared the area where it was planned from trees and protesters. But there where lawsuits going on and not much was actually build. It would have been to expensive to continue and they already knew that it most likely would be stopped sooner or later.
@@Ulrich.BierwischIndeed, renewables have gotten so cheap that electricity companies view nuclear fission plants as no longer commercially viable, and not just in Germany... In the US and UK projects to build new plants have been cancelled over and over, in other countries governments stepped in with huge subsidies financed from tax money...
@@jnievele It's already to expensive if it works like expected but it's not possible to get insurance in the case of an accident. Think about something like Chernobyl or Fukushima happens in the French reactor in Cattenom. Depending on the wind direction it's possible that Luxemburg, a whole country, has to be evacuated or the German state Saarland. How would this be compensated? What is the price tag of a whole country?
@Ulrich.Bierwisch Yep. Really only feasible if you want to use it produce Plutonium for nuclear weapons... But even that is expensive and dangerous, as Switzerland found out the hard way (another story few people know). Of course in Germany geography also played a major role... Like "Oh, let's place that new reactor in the scenic Rhine valley near Koblenz, not too many people there and it's far from the Iron Curtain... Wait, what do you mean that vulcano is still active, couldn't you have told us a few years earlier????"
With the ball feed system, into the reactor..... was going to type up why I thought this would be a problem, then I watched the rest of the video LOL thanks John
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*Mistake correction around 3 minutes I should have said neutron instead of proton when talking about Th232!!
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hey brother. i figured this is my best chance to let you know how much i love your videos. these are so cool. you do a very fun and intelligent presentation almost like the old history channel videos but fun and its about obscure stuff not stuff we all already watched ten billion videos about.. like chernoble🙄. you are the best man. cheers from baltimore maryland. its pronounced *mare-uh-lind* by the way...
Cassettes please....
The East german vvr440 reactors at Griefswald is also interesting. Staff destroyed cooling twice.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Thanks!
@@PlainlyDifficult I was wondering about that. Proton activation is totally a thing, but it's significantly more difficult due to the magnetic repulsion.
Mr. Difficult making his video title: "This Nuke Has BALLS!"
I wonder if that's what his wife calls him, "Mr. Difficult."
@@sarahedin7634She does, Plainly.
Sak🥜
😂
The "Oh Balls" guy we see in most PD videos must love this particular video
Balls breaking under high pressure release toxic radioactive gas? Who knew?
🤣😂🤣😂💀☢️💀☢️
Thtr made it through no nut November 😂
It is more a contamination of highly pressurized gas coming into contact with the Uranium 235 and Uranium 233 (bred from the Thorium), which then got ejected.
Didn't a number of TH-camrs recently say, Thorium is a great material to reactivate any old Uranium, so that we can get much more out of it, and that it would be totally safe? Of course not with this graphite technology which is prone to accidents (Windscale, Tchernobyl), it will be totally safe (Three Mile Island) [/sarcasm]. I really wonder how this is meant to work...
6:37 "Sent to the ball removal device" sounds like where naughty nuclear engineeres go when they fuck up once too often
That’s just a ball pit, for the kids to play in ya know
When Rube-Goldberg machines go bad and no one has fun
Zesty balls
Mutant power acquisition pit.
"You know; for kids!"
I read this comment in a Minnesota accent, lol
Oh wow this is near me. Due to work i always drive past there on the A2 and even nowadays without the THTR cooling tower, that powerplant always mesmerizes me
Wasn't that the biggest cooling tower in the world, in its day?
ach guck auch einer aus der Gegend
@@zh84 Yes, it took until 2002 before it was surpassed by a cooling tower at Niederaussem Power Station, also in Germany. It still holds the record for the tallest cooling tower constructed out of steel, and the tallest cooling tower of any kind that has ever been demolished.
Hamm einfach Mal bekannt geworden 😂
The "Oh Balls" guy we see in most PD videos must love this particular video
5:11 missed opportunity to insert a guy with a „balls“ speech bubble
Also mised the traditional graphic for "side note".
My thoughts exactly! I expected a character in a radiation suit and the speech bubble to come in any second!
Including the footstepping. But this incident was too small for a hazmat equipment.
3:42 That the thumbs-up hand is shaking nervously 😂 it's these subtle things that make this channel top-notch! 😂😂
I live in Germany. The accident is actually unknown to the general Public.
The escaped radiation was detected by universities and people who bought or built radiation detectors due to the Chernobyl incident. But this radiation was blamed on Chernobyl. As far as the general public knew, the deadly Chernobyl cloud had arrived and Germany had never, ever any nuclear accidents.
Back then, my favorite Computer magazine even had published schematics and programs to monitor radiation using your Commodore 64.
What had really killed the German nuclear industry was Fukusima. 3 months before that incident, our Chancellor Angela Merkel had said something like "She as a physicist had done some calculations and came to the conclusion that German nuclear power plants are perfectly safe!". A month after the incident, she had recalculated and came to the conclusion that nobody could claim that nuclear power plants could be perfectly safe.
Merkel didn't really think that nuclear power plants are unsafe. She made a political decision, not a technical one.
I am original from Germany and I had never heard of it until this video. What killed the German nuclear industry was Chernobyl and the author Gudrun Pausewang, who‘s nuclear doomsday propaganda novels for teenagers were a mandatory read in schools for many years starting in the late 80s and traumatized entire generations. Added to this the nuclear fear of the Pershing missile crisis in Germany in the 80s there was a wide spread anti-nuclear mainstream already established in the 90s and 00s. Fukishima then was the nail in the coffin for the public opinion and politics took shutting down all plants as an easy win the public opinion.
@@AquaMarin-ww3qxfunny how different countries propagandized students. When I was a kid in the 60s in the USA, desks were considered "cover" for fallout.
Which shows she was politician first and a scientist a very distant second. Changing your "science" according to your emotions makes one a very poor scientist.
I just watched a vid last night from WATOP & he mentioned that. It was a sad vid about all the old villages like Old Manhein torn down & even graves relocated to dig up a special coal called lignite. The vid is titled This Is Crazy. That's Why Germany Ended Up So Deep Underground. My Great, great & maybe 1 more great Grampa was a Frick from Bavaria. Who moved to Indiana in 1840. I'm a Beyer & live in Wyoming.
I always get so happy when PlainlyDifficult finds a new nuclear incident to report on. Those were the videos that initially got me to subscribe, but I’ve grown to love all of his content. As a proponent of nuclear energy, I’m always interested in the way he deconstructs and explains these problems. If we just used nuclear alongside renewables (solar, wind, hydroelectric) we could offset global warming by a lot. It’s important to educate the public regarding nuclear since now it’s essentially synonymous with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Issue is, Nuclear can not work together with renewables at all, this is why Spain shutting down all Reactors middle of Spring and turning them on again in Late Autunum.
To mutch Solar, another issue is the not mine enough Uranium, by 2030 the have a staying warning there will by not enough Uranium,
avaible to fuel all of them, well could by earlier as this.
Third one look at france, how often they have energy Crisis because the Nuclear Plants failing again.
This is why Spain, Belgium, Germany and co decided to drop nuclear power.
In a way of Irony france
The problem is, if a conventional power plant goes totally berserk, it might cause mayhem in the vicinity. If a nuclear power plant does so, the damage is first invisible, then often continuing over a span of decades or even generations. The only contenders to this amount of hazard are chemistry plants and waste management companies, especially if the latter provide their services for the former.
Talking about waste: Is there any final storage place in the world, for nuclear waste? One that doesn't need to be cooled constantly?
@@gabbyn978 There is a Singel Final Storage, buut not enough. IAgree with all points.
I am applying for grad schemes in this industry as an environmental science graduate. I agree with your message!
@@gabbyn978instead of nuclear, we then burn coal in huge coal powerplants that release loads of toxic compounds. And these power plants are incredibly dangerous in comparison to nuclear. Far more die each and every single year from coal power plants than the people who died from all nuclear accidents added together.
There is another flaw with the reactor. The reason for the high level of radioactive dust inside is that nobody had anticipated that constantly poking a ball pit with rods could scrape off material. The control rods had damaged the balls. The incident would not have happened if the balls were not damaged due to this design flaw. The radioactive material was supposed to be contained inside the balls. The airlock was meant to be a second line of defense - not to be the primary and only line of defense against the leaking of radiation.
Yes, and it was a prototype before larger reactors were built. It is only 300 MWel the East Germans had several vver440 with 400 MWel output
not anticipated? the first thing I though was is it actually stabbing the fuel pellets every time you throttle it down
@@limes5295 I believe the idea was that graphite on graphite causes very little friction. But, well... 🤷Someone involved in the AVR described it as: "The pellets go in shaped like balls, and come out not shaped like balls."
The whole project - including the AVR which was built at the site of a research institute - was financed not by scientific grants, but by industry money. So I guess there was a lot of pressure to "make it work", or at least pretend that it works, no matter what.
@@ahoannon5711 it wasn't graphite on graphite, balls were coated with silicon carbide, which is supposed to be wear resistant. But it's also brittle and inner pressure of gaseous fission products could tear it apart.
well for sure the control rods slide within pipes. would make no sense otherweise. but there is abrasion everywhere just by the balls sliding along each other. plus this "safest fuel of the earth" multiplies the amount of waste, by it being embedded in tons of radioactve carbon. crazy design.
Many thanks for the video, John! Your documentary style couples disasters with a slightly light-hearted approach and your graphics are signature now. Straight and to the point. Cheers!
Thank you
My Saturday morning is not complete until I've seen a Plainly Difficult video with Balls. Thanks, John!
Saying "Oopsie" heals any oopsie.
😂😂
Even an RBMK sized oopsie?
uncontestable fact!!!
Ohh, I used to live near there. At Keitstraße 31! I took several measurements in the area and the radiation actually rises to mSivert in some places, at least according to my Geiger counter. How great that you made something out of my surroundings. Thank you very much.
The best thing is that when I asked if it was possible to take a tour of the reactor and its building in the current state, despite the secure lockdown, I received an answer from the operator: We do not operate deactivated or active nuclear power plants. ' When I then said that this was interesting and then wrote the reactor with its type and address and that the press might be interested in the fact that it had been forgotten, especially as it had been involved in such a serious accident, I was contacted from a very high level in a very very friendly manner.
hello from St Louis, MO! 🇺🇸❤️🇩🇪
How did that go?! The contact that is.
@@jed-henrywitkowski6470The highest radiation concentration I measured was at the gate to the small cooling towers. Where the 2 small ones and the middle one stood. They have now also been demolished. Not yet at that time. That's when my Geiger counter went off. Also at the bridge you have to go under if you want to get to the power station.
Are you sure you are talking about MILLIsievert? I have been several times to Chornobyl and just at very local certain points i was able to exceed 1000 Microsieverts per hour ( which equals 1 Millisievert).
Grüße aus der Jülicher Ecke, wo es auch einen Kugelhaufenreaktor gibt/gab ;).
You sound strangely happy about living near a disaster site...
"More Balls Plz" sounds like low-budget, over-the-top, gay porno movie. 😂😂😂
Awesome 8=====D
title: "hot reactor boyz"
Anybody else wince when "ball removal device" was mentioned?😮 😂
@@henryturnerjr3857 100%.
I've came to worse....
Forbidden ball pit.
What an elegant cooling tower suspended from a central pylon. Exquisite.
I thought so.
Took me, an American, a few seconds to catch the "Cockneys of Europe" joke, and when I did I lol'd unashamedly.
Thank you for the video! Your work is always nicely researched, understandable, and humorous without being disrespectful. This video did indeed have many many balls. More lol's. Thanks again!
As someone highly interested in the Chernobyl disaster and growing up only about 100 miles from this particular reactor, I am surprised I had never heard of this disaster! The German nuclear power plants that didn't get axed back then ended up getting closed in a post-Fukushima Pavlov reaction.
It was not a disaster and that is why you did not hear. Government agencies know how to play human FEAR, if they tell you early then it might be too late if they don't tell you then they know they have been wasting your money.
Tbf, it can hardly be considered a disaster, but rather an 'industrial accident' with no effect on public health. The estimated additional radiation dose for the public in the vicinity was less than 0.01 mSv, which is negligible compared to the natural background radiation (about 2-3 mSv/year in Germany). By comparison, a chest X-ray involves a dose of about 0.1 mSv, while a transatlantic flight can expose you to approximately 0.05 mSv."
Some nuclear engineer somewhere said, "Chernobyl was bad and all, but let's see just how many moving parts we can stuff into one of these things!" and thus was this ridiculously complicated gumball-machine-of-death created.
Chernobyl's meltdown happened just days before this incident, so it could not have been in the minds of the designers or builders of the German reactor. It _should_ have been (and probably was) on the minds of the people running the plant day to day, but to what degree that would lead to screwing up worse rather than self-correcting is hard to say.
This is a German design. The Germans have a love of complexity bordering of a fetish.This is all you need to know.
Thorium was actually the front runner in the race for fueling the first nuclear reactors. It did however have one major drawback, it didn't produce weapons grade materials as a by product.
You can make weapons grade in a thorium reactor, it's just harder to do. The Manhattan Project was trying to build nuclear explosives as quickly as possible.
Of course it did. The fuel in the thorium cycle is U-233, which is said to be just as good a material as Pu-239, based on the minimal testing with U-233 warheads. But it does require some extra steps to make.
The key word here is *Balls* a very English sort of reference, which can cover a number of final outcomes. These are cycled up and down, removed when damaged or the fuel is not reactive enough.
*Graphite* is a very soft material, while Thorium and Uranium are hard. Imagine making 2-inch diameter balls, using gypsum powder, aka “Plaster of Paris,” (PoP) interspersed with heavy chunks of metal, then sending these through a conveyer-belt system that slowly grinds them together, in a continuous process that has NOT miraculously suspended friction coefficients nor the Delta Vee of inertia/mass differential. Any short “Drop” would act upon the materials differently, eventually breaking these balls apart. Even without this particular operator error, *bad things* would eventually happen!
As Clarkson would say, just before one of his hare-brained schemes blew up in his face on *Top Gear* “What could possibly go wrong”? 😂😂😂😂😂
When operated above 800C the graphite is annealed and becomes much stronger. This feature was discovered over 40 years ago...lessons learned by nuclear incidents at that time in experimental test reactors. In addition, the recent (TRISO, or TRISO-X) 6cm pebbles have added other silicon coverings that protect the soft graphite from operational damage. These fuel pebbles have been under development since the 1950s and are recently much safer.
👍 You earned an extra thumbs up for the Top Gear reference. Ahhhh, the good old days. 🤭
AVR shown many of the problems - while it irradiated people walking by because shielding is not needed on the top - but they went ahead anyway.
One reason why the anti nuclear movement was and is so strong in Germany was the constant stream of fuckups and coverups happening. That there are also leucemia clusters around two power plants certainly did not help.
@@Carlos-im3hnImho they should have already been safe in 1986, as there had been ample time to fix the issue. Also, how do you make sure that the material will not become changed, or even brittle over time? Radiation is nothing to trifle with.
@@methanbreather I know of the increased number of leucemia cases around Brunsbuettel and Kruemmel. The problem is: It is very hard to link them to the nuclear plants. There are radioactive sources everywhere around you, like the granite cobblestones in your market place, or the Radon that had accumulated in the basement; even cigarettes contain radioactive substances. I don't mean that it is impossible that the nuclear power plants had an effect on the kids, only that it is impossible to prove the connection beyond any doubt.
For a nuclear incident, this seems extremely minor. I almost feel like the German government was just looking for excuses to ditch nuclear power.
Probably a combination of the fossil fuel lobby and Chernobyl anxiety.
If any, it was Fukushima anxiety. After Chernobyl, business went on as always (with Helmut Kohl at the helm)
@@gabbyn978 But Fukushima didn't happen for another 20+ years..? THTR-300 was killed in 1989.
Exactly. The decision to shut down nuclear plants was made after Fukushima
@@aircraftcarrierwo-class It also really never was used in the debate about nuclear power in Germany. The last nuclear reactors in Germany were taken offline in the beginning of 2023, so I do not know why he claims that this reactor incident contributed to the decisions taken against nuclear power. It is also very unknown in Germany, basicially nobody in the general public talks about this incident. Source: I'm German
I haven't checked the data again but I think German electricity wasn't actually so dependent on Russian gas. Rather, Germany burned a lot of domestic lignite.
Russian gas was more required for heating and many chemical processes. Electricity was just a very small part of the usage of Russian gas.
Yes, their mines started encroaching on villages. And lignite coal is the dirtiest form of coal. They also speed built floating gasification plants on the coast to import LNG from other countries, AND kept the last reactors online 4 months past their shutdown dates cause they needed the power.
Yes, the share of imported gas used in power plants is only around 13% right now.
And its share in the electric primary energy was never that high anyway, somewhere in the 12% to 17% band over the last three decades if I remember correctly.
Natural gas plants were needed in the "nuclear age" anyway to compensate for load changes. Nuclear plants can only change their output very slowly while gas plants are the most flexibility.
So back then they were needed as major plants were not flexible enough, now they are needed to compensate renewables volatility.
Until we get more scalable storage than the few pump storage water plants we have, and better ways to balance supply and demand on the demand side, too.
Which are both finally becoming technically viable now ...
@@hartmutholzgraefe There is yet another on-demand kind of power plant, the pumped-storage hydroelectricity. But there are only so many slopes on which you can place thesre devices.
Edit: no, energy storage via the lifting of concrete blocks on ropes won't count for me. There hasn't even been a pilot project that would prove that such a construction can deal properly with wind gusts or earthquakes, so it is out of the question.
This video is a prime Example of why I love you, you help a dumbbell like me understand atomic situations. Keep up your amazing work!
This is the highlight of the week. Cheers from Sweden!
Thank you!!
Ja det är det!!
It's a bit telling when every other country's "Chernobyl" resulted in so little harm. Even Fukushima Daiichi.
Fukushima Daiichi was a near miss.
What's telling is the continuous downplaying of the issue and the patently false claims by the nuclear supporters.
(I've read the internal NRC comms transcripts and the email trails BTW - if you are thinking of educating (gaslighting) me about 'truth' or something )
@rwerk66 A near miss?
@@rwerk66 "false claims" Like the fact that chernobyl is one of the only nuclear failures which resulted in a big amount of loss of life and issues due to completely incompetence? Because thats not false at all... You think you're so smart but the entire fukushima incident is documented and available to the itnernet so no clue what you mean with "internal NRC and email trails" but you keep gaslighting yourself. Even with Fukushima there was a fair bit of incompetence and corruption present. Mostly from the goverment and power company themselves trying to cover this up. Luckily it was less devestating then chernobyl
Nuclear power has by FAR the least lethality out of any and all ways of creating energy and so far even with chernobyl the least impact on the worlds environment.
@@rwerk66 I don't believe anyone has ever said it was anything other than a near miss, there were three meltdowns...
@@krashd It wasn't ever close to having a much worse outcome. For a while there was concern that the core melt in Unit 1 had nearly breached secondary containment. In reality it had eaten through less than 1/4 of the 2.6 m of concrete.
That is possibly the least disastrous disaster you have ever shown us. I agree it seems an over reaction. Fossil fuel coal burning is also fraught with health implications.
least disastrous, more balls! overshadowed by Chernobyl
Especially browncoal/lignite. About 300 times the amount of health complications and deaths per TWh than nuclear.
And yes, that statistic includes Chernobyl and Fukushima. Coal is still 300 times worse.
it has hands down the most involvement of balls though.
I've found the pebble bed design of reactor to be really interesting for a while, and yet this wasn't a failure point that I knew about. In theory the PBR is a high efficiency self-regulating reactor with a constant online cycle as it doesn't need to be shut down for fueling.
Now the reason for using a lot of tennis ball sized fuel elements rather than the usual rods was in for safety. The machine is supposed to be self regulating, due to the mechanical properties of the pebble's. Each ball is flexible, and can expand when heated - which moves the fuel particles farther apart, slowing the reaction. (Much like the negative void coefficient of a well designed BWR reactor, but without the complication of handling phase changes). Using a gas coolant has assorted advantages in handling and heat capacity for thermal efficiency.
Conversely - the fuel balls were also the weak point of the design. Traditional fuel rods are sintered metal in a ceramic casing, inside a metal tube. PBR elements are quite fragile by comparison, as they needed to expand and contract. They would rub together and create dust, crack, or shatter, and in turn could become stuck in places. Apparently trying to encase uranium in stuff that has the mechanical properties of pencil lead was a bit messier than originally thought.
Also, moving pebbles tend to settle down in a tighter configuration, which makes (re)moving single pieces difficult. Fill a glass with uncooked rice, stick a knife into the rice, shake the glass for a while, and you can lift the glass by pulling the knife handle up. This effect is especially strong with oblong elements, but in principle valid for everything that is made of many small roundish objects (ground liquefaction when an earthquake occurs). That reminds me: The Rhine Valley has experienced quakes up to a magnitude of four (breaking turrets off the Dome of Cologne)
@@gabbyn978 Of course that begs the question of if they could have the coolant flowing up at high pressure so they can have a fluidized bed pebble bed reactor... Probably not, but now I'm going to singing "I can't get no - liquefaction" like the rolling stones all day.
Just a moment of appreciation for the wonderful 3/4 of a second dramatic pause between 'Which leads us on to The Disaster' and... 'The Disaster'. Ah, as if any hope was still possible :D
as a german, i see it the same as you. the government shouldn´t have phased out the clean nuclear energy and instead using dirty expensive fossil fuels. was a bad choice
Been following you from the beginning man. Me and my family love the content. Keep up the phenomenal work and know that every video teaches someone something new 👏👏👏. Thanks.
3:09 The only defining property of an element is it's number of protons. Change that, and you change the element to something else. If you add a proton to thorium it becomes protactinium. You change an elements isotope by adding or subtracting neutrons, never protons. I think he meant to add a neutron which then decays into being another protron, becoming protactinium.
Aye, the number of protons defines the element, neutrons the isotope, and electrons the charge.
@@krashd Yes. A neutron is slightly more massive than a proton and when absorbed into an unstable nucleus it can decay, becoming a proton thus changing that element into the next one up on the table of elements. At least that's my basic uneducated understanding
Sir, your videos are top notch. A true professional. Congratulations on success!
Thank you!
Germany also had its ""Three Mile Island" moment. The Gundremmingen Block A reactor was a complete loss after an accident.
What a put the Griefswald accidents, the last one was also a total loss
TMI is reopening under the new name "Crane".
Philippsburg went on after the 1983 incident (damaged fuel rods released radioacive matierial, radioactive Iodine-131 got into the environment), until 2019
@@itcanwait To power a data centre I think, supposedly by 2030 almost a quarter of all electricity generated in the world will be used for the internet. That's one huge feedbag for a rogue AI 🤣
“Experienced a whoopsie just a short period after the old bugger up”
This is the content I come here for.
Seriously though, this is the only channel my brain hasn’t got bored of after a year.
Really good primer on thorium and pebble bed reactors in this video. It sounds like there were some odd 'we didn't consider this possible risk' engineering flaws in the THTR series, like the fact there didn't seem to be very many safeguards against radioactive vapors getting into parts of the system where they weren't supposed to be.
This reactor was kind of an experiment, to check out new technologies. Turned out, it is more difficult to handle than they had imagined. This path was no longer followed.
@gabbyn978 not with this architecture at least.
Pebble reactors are still being pursued almost entirely due to regulatory constraints. Pebbles are a halfway point between the now technologically capped solid fuel reactor and the much more desirable liquid fuel reactor.
And while on the technical side it makes it inherit the worst traits of both reactor types, it does make it ironically an easier thing to license and lowers the collaterals you need to pay to even be allowed to build it.
It also makes it considerably easier to utility companies that can still leverage exclusive fuel contracts like they have with solid fuels. Pebbles can be made to only fit in a certain reactor type, and thus it allows the fuel producers to raise the price of fuel without consequences. Meanwhile a liquid fuel blend can be made by just about anyone and it isn't form factor constrained which means all the fuel providers would be in competition for the first time, driving down the cost of nuclear fuel and therefore the profit of these companies.
One thing about the view of nuclear power in germany is also the publishing of the novel Die Wolke (called Fall-out in its english translation) that came out in 87 and became part of a lot of school curricula, which deals with a theoretical catastrophic reactor meltdown in germany.
Also as someone who grew up in a town with a uranium enrichment plant, that was also not very popular locally. Add to that constant news stories about the mishandling and question of storing nuclear waste, there’s definitely a lot of points there. So instead cities are getting destroyed to dig for more coal
I live not far away from the small AVR reactor that tested this technology in Jülich. They also had a lot of incidents and even a very close call that could have been the real German Chernobyl.
They have Graphite in a core at very high temperature. The reactor was run by absolute fanboys of this technology and they lied a lot about problems and dangers that come with it. They later had to admit that it was impossible to even measure the actual temperature in the core. They used test balls with a very simple way to measure the maximum temperature but they came thru maxed out and they decided to continue not knowing how far above the designed temperature the thing was running.
Also the number of balls that came out broken was much higher then expected.
The fact that just during Chernobyl something had happened and they kept it secret was of course unacceptable and at this time the whole concept of the THTR300 was already proven to be to expensive and not capable to achieve the promised features. It was sold to the public as high temperature generator that is capable to produce high temperatures not just for electric power but for industrial use like steal production. It was already clear that this wasn't going to happen and it was obvious that this technology was to complicated for electrical energy only.
It seems very similar to the thorium concepts today with promised features and difficult business plans..
"that it was impossible to even measure the actual temperature in the core" - that reminds me so much of Windscale.
@@gabbyn978 Graphite in combination with hot nuclear reactions is calling for trouble. I think the piles in Windscale are still waiting to get dismantled.
Only the idea to cool the reactor with sodium is even worse. Gives a nice explosion in case of a fire or flooding if something happens. This German reactor was never fueled up and transformed into an amusement park (Wunderland Kalkar).
@@gabbyn978 Windscale was also being operated at FAR higher energy levels than originally intended, and even higher than was needed to anneal the graphite moderator. They were trying to make enough tritium to qualify for US help in making hydrogen bombs.
@@Ulrich.Bierwisch They did start working on Windscale a few years ago. Keep in mind that they followed General Procedure #1 when it comes to nuclear accidents: Can we just seal this up and let it sit while it cools off? They waited so long to start working on the interior of Windscale because they could just seal it up and let the radioactives slowly burn themselves away. Now, the stuff inside is far less dangerous than it was just after the accident. (This was also the basic plan for Chernobyl at the time, and it's a good one: If you can keep the radioactive materials from escaping, the safest thing to do is let the stuff burn itself out. Once most of the really nasty stuff is gone, it's far easier to clean up.)
That dry cooling tower is amazing tho. Excuse me, I meant "amazeballs".
That is a shit ton of steel!
There’s also Australia’s Chernobyl, but instead of radiation, it’s asbestos. The entire town of Wittenoom is contaminated with blue asbestos, which was mined nearby. We still have the highest mesothelioma rates in the world because of it
I love waking up and learning about some new disaster while I make breakfast 😭❤️ genuinely ty for making these videos, the quality and research that goes into them in unmatched
I've always been fascinated by this design, and had no idea that it had already had a (quite ill-fated) test. Thanks, educational and humorous as always: you're what TH-cam is all about!
I stayed in Germany in the 70s and the whole nuclear power program was controversial. Atomkraft Nein Danke stickers were everywhere and it seemed every younger person wore a badge. It's one of the reasons why the Green movement became so powerful there.
Germans never understood nuclear power. I have met people who seriously believe that reactors can explode like bombs, and that the accident in Chornobyl was a nuclear explosion. Meanwhile the proponents of nuclear power don't care either; they just use it as a vehicle to shame the government, even though this government wasn't the one who decided to phase out nuclear power before phasing out coal. For somebody fascinated by nuclear physics and the engineering that goes into such plants, it's like watching two bands of monkeys throwing poo at each other.
We are in fact too stoopid. Especially today, as all the moved to parts of the world where they could build reactors instead of wind turbines.
For the life of me, I do not understand anti-Nuclear so-called "Green" politics. Renewable generation sources aren't -- and won't be for a while -- capable of meeting our energy needs. By opposing nuclear generation, you end up supporting fossil fuel as a consequence.
Humans are truly geniuses, aren't we.
@@NeovanGoth I doubt anyone who isn't particularly interested in the inner workings of a nuclear power plant (= the majority of the population), would know that a meltdown is not the same as a nuclear explosion...So why specifically accuse Germans lmao
That whole design never should have got off the ground. I think engineers get so wrapped up in solving a challenge, they lose sight of the fact this is a bad idea. Thorium is good. This reactor just has too many complicated places to fail. 😢
Reliance on fan driven helium sounds like a trouble point waiting to happen.
Light water reactors seem like they're a lot more manageable when trouble emerges.
The concept of this one was that they could always release the ball pit into an emergency chamber below where the balls would be spread out sufficiently to mostly stop further reactions ... as far as I remember ...
The UK still uses advanced gas cooled reactors, which also rely on the blower to circulate the coolant.
@@luelou8464 I know the UK also built some liquid metal cooled fast reactors. Or, at least one. A plutonium breeder reactor. And if they could get the public acceptance required to put the entire set of facilities in one place so you never had to ship stuff like spent fuel between sites, we'd essentially eliminate all the transport issues in nuclear power.
Seriously? Who the heck thought pinball ciche would look good on a breeder reactor, ive noticed that basically all reactor incidents are the result of poorly designed mechanical systems.
You obviously do remember the beginning of Back To The Future 1.
The Libyans thought pinball machine parts looked preeeety good, even thought they passed for a nuclear weapon. How do you think he got the plutonium for the Delorean?
_"More balls plz"_ famous last words
Simply for the science of it all, and how freakin' cool it is, have you ever done something on Earth's own, natural nuclear reactor they found in Gabon? I believe it's the only time we've ever discovered such a phenomenon.
The Pebble Bed reactor was almost designed to fail. One they were trying two brand new never before tried technologies together which is never a good thing. Second The Pebble Bed Reactor control scheme was essentially like a vending machine. The Pebble Bed reactor relied on ball handling paths whose reliability was tenuous at best. In fact it was a ball handling error that crashed the system. Also the high hard minimum add ball limit prevented any granular adjustment of the system if needed. The manual add system added human fault to a system that had few redundant fault tolerant safety systems. This is essentially a rube-Goldberg reactor design destined to fail. Human Arrogance led to this disaster.
"vending" machine should be "Pachinko" machine with the 6cm pebbles falling down slowly in the reactor among other control pebbles among dynamic control rods.
That whole 'testing two brand new technologies together' thing is probably a result of a severely stretched research budget which is 'expected' to produce results. Trying to achieve massive breakthroughs on the cheap is always dangerous.
@@momon969 Yes these are all complex. The new GenIV pebble bed reactors hopefully have addressed all the issues after 60 years of development. The new GenIV designs have many passive and other automated controls to avoid many (and hopefully all) issues.
That was a basic interlock problem, as in, how could anyone do that crap and sign it as OK... From the place that is anal with safety...
@@momon969 Too true.
The whole concept of this reactor was absolutely nuts. It had loads of ridiculous flaws that should have meant it never left the drawing board.
This has to be one of the worst, weirdest reactor designs yet. Its like trying to make a boat out of ping pong balls and then declaring all boats are terrible once it sank.
5:32 Oh, that's not even close to difficult-to-pronounce German. It's no Eichhörnchen, that's for sure.
Yeah, that's like regular German, no over the top complicated german.
Workgroup experimental reactor
That was my immediate reaction too 😂 Then I considered the fact that I know just enough german to break it back into the less-daunting component words.
No Eichhörnchen - in English.
Are Bites Geh Mine Shaft
Fair Sooks Reactor
Would be an imperfect pronunciation guide for rainy, south-east corner of London accents.
(Working Group on Experimental Reactors)
@@LongPeter Actuelly, Gruppe and Group are meaning the same, add an e to the end, and you are good. And the mine shaft is a Grube, so totally a different thing. Related to 'graben' which means 'to dig'
Hate when people see anything nuclear related and immediately say “we should just use thorium it’s cheaper and safer!” like just say you watched that one Sam o Nella video and that’s it
Didn’t know you had a sound engineering degree, but your mix has always been excellent so I’m not surprised. Great video as always.
One of my favorite channels; keep up the amazing work!
You already mentioned my suggestion somewhat in this video. If you have A LOT of free time, you could look into the HTR of the AVR Jülich (AVR or as you tried to call it: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor). It had some accidents and some releases into the environment. It's hard to find though because they covered a lot of stuff up, but there must be a report somewhere from an independent commission from a few years ago.
AVR had plenty of issues, like those fuel balls very often disintegrating. But what it's mostly remembered for is lacking overhead shielding... Some bright spark decided that nuclear radiation couldn't do any damage just being radiated into space, so why bother shielding the roof? Just make sure no rain gets in, good enough for a government contract. Planes weren't allowed anywhere nearby anyway, and birds should be fast enough not to get TOO much radiation. So they started experiments, and all went fine... Until the weather changed, and thick clouds happened to come in. Suddenly radiation detectors went off everywhere... Turns out clouds can reflect ionizing radiation. Oops...
Sounds interesting.
These pebble reactors are really a great concept, but just like everything else....
When it works, it's awesome! When it does not work, it might have an almost incomprehensible negative impact.
You just have to look at the glowing silver lining.
Balls, what a disaster. :) Thank you and have a great week.
Thorium reactors work, but this desigh is not smart. On the level of US "homogenus" reactor in the 1950s.
Fuel prone to damage is thrown around, bad transport and sealing of the system.
Why? German habit of complicating things i presume.
"Sit back and enjoy the glowing information in this video."
I see what you did there LOL
Balls!
Gotta love a sphere
1:32 "Grenade mode." Oh, boy. Already an ominous start to the video. lol
Nobody dies and no damage at a nuclear accident: *Complete Hysteria*
Regular injury, deaths and lingering health problems at coal: *crickets*
👏🏼 THIS 👏🏼
I actually pass the site quite often and never heared about this incident even tho I spend my free time with the whole nuclear energy topic.
BALLS!
Oh wait...we have actual balls this time.
“Idiot who also has a sound engineering degree explanation” really hit home for me
Chernobyl aside, I think there were other factors at play as well:
Pretty much the whole Western nuclear power generation economy runs on uranium fuel rods, so a new player with a different and moreso a national technology plus relatively cheap fuel meant competition.
Yes, the little oopsie wasn´t exactly good press, but the problems had been resolved, the reactor could have run on.
On broken graphite? Who can guarantee that this would not have happened in the main chamber either, as the control rods were poking through tons of graphite balls all the time?
The THTR reactor design is a literal pile of shit lol 😂
Reading on Wikipedia, planning of the THTR-300 reactor already started in 1966, before the experiments at the AVR test reactor were even complete. This meant that the THTR-300 design could not even take all of the results of the experiments conducted at the test reactor into consideration. In 1971 one of the construction companies (part of Krupp) pulled out of the contract because their management after seeing the final results from the AVR test reactor lost confidence in the pebble bed reactor design. The remaining companies still continued the THTR-300 project because they wanted a design to compete with the then new light-water reactors. So this whole project was ill-fated right from the start...
Balls
Thank you
Geoff?
Another banger from plainly difficult ready on my lunch break. Thanks again John.
Got a loicense for that chicken, mate? :D
I live in the Region around this Reactor, amd I've heard the rumour that radioactive gas had been released from the facility into the Tschernobyl cloud - so this video verifies it!
The plant is now powered by fossil fuels😅 but the cooling towers still can be observed from my backyard
Kinda makes you wonder how many other undisclosed radioactive releases are occurring in the world's nuclear power plants.
Kinda hard to hide radioactive material releases of any size, as many people/organizations outside of government have detectors and understand how to use them.
How many Xrays have you undergone? How many times have you stood in bright sunshine? Just a volcano will release more radiation than Chernobyl.
@@seanworkman431 When you address people as if they're idiots, it mostly reveals your own insecurity. I'm not even going to spent time on my background and knowledge when it comes to radiation issues. My comment was aimed at the unfortunate tendency of governments, corporations, etc. to keep secrets.
@@lizblock9593 mate, I had a friend that spent 6 years at university to become an engineer and when he got his 'big break' he called me up and asked me how to do it.
I do not give a flying F about your emotions, if you are an idiot the rest of the community should be warned so the dumb F doesn't start mking stupid decisions.
Do an IQ test and get back to me.
@@lizblock9593 the're, spelling correction. What is it that you do again?
2:27 "the important part here is the word-" *balls*
50 becquerels seems very low. Isn’t that similar to what’s given off by several bananas?
Super grateful for the animations in this one. I can't imagine following along with words alone!
When I was watching you explain how that system worked, I said to myself that such a complicated system of feeding, circulating, and removing the fuel balls was doomed to fail. Way too complicated.
yeah sounds overly complicated. Though the actual accident I'd say is not caused by that system's complexity, but by the feeding mechanism being poorly designed. At least as explained in this video, it first seems stupid that you have an automated loading mechanism that can't load the precise amounts needed. Worse is that for the manual procedure, there seem to have been little fail safe in place to prevent you from accidentally venting radioactive gas. It should've been impossible to just open the release valve when radioactive gas might've made it into that chamber without overriding a good number of blinking red lights and "are you sure?" popup equivalents. And/or it would seem wise to me to have a geiger counter at the release tubes that blares alarms to the operators, or automatically shuts the valve on its own, if radioactive gas being vented is detected.
yes, far too complex for a simple human operator to identify and avoid all the failure mechnisms "on the spot" in real-time with an operational reactor.
Humans design these and need to avoid or mitigate many latent failure modes _before_ becoming operational.
Love your videos could watch them for hours. You should cover the 1977 granville rail disaster
By far the biggest difficulty with nuclear power is spineless politicians and mindless nimbys. Discuss!😂
You don't have one in your vicinity, do you? If a country is barely more than half the size of Texas, yet has nearly 85 million people living in it, and 23 locations of nuclear power plants, all distributed over major river valleys, there remains no place that is further away from such a facility than ten miles, except maybe some mountain villages. Imagine to live there, not knowing what is going on inside the buildings, or if the concrete is still in good condition.
@ I am close to Sizewell and it’s 3 plants and I’m fine with that. Chernobyl required gross misconduct to initiate and quite frankly Fukushima required gross incompetence at the design FMEA stage to make happen.
I am much more concerned about the us airbases close by now sleepy joe wants to bequeath the world a doomsday to remember him by.
@@robinwells8879 Japan is a first world country, scarred by the experience of a nuclear explosion (a real nuclear explosion, not this hydrogen reaction that blew the roofs off of Fukushima Daichi), and yet this did happen. Why? Because they could not figure that a magnitude nine quake would render their elaborate controls inoperable.
You may call this an instance of negligence. But no one had believed that such a thing would be possible. Like the mysterious freak waves that had been considered a sailor's yarn for centuries until one hit an oil rig platform and left an unmistakable mark.
Regarding Biden: Maybe I have no idea about Joes politics, but I never had the impression that he is a real falcon. He was responsible for the safety of this country, and that's it. Anyway, you don't have to worry about him for long. I wonder what is coming next. An eight ball?
@@robinwells8879Suffolk? I'm in Norfolk! I'm happy Sizewell C is going ahead. To be fair to Fukushima, the power plants were destroyed by the quake and tsunami, a very unpredictable event that cannot be controlled 😢
@ not so wise to put the emergency power below sea level in a high risk tsunami zone. Otherwise it was a fine plant.
You could make a follow up Video on the AVR Jülich which has nearly blown up. And had multiple incidents that released harmful amounts of radiation parcely due to missing shielding.
I guess you could say that reactor was BALLS
The real question is what happened to the other 299 versions of the previous THTR? Did the nuclear engineers finally decide they found 299 ways not to make a nuclear actor? 😂
13:22 Should have been a zero ... the reactor had a interface loss of coolant directly into the environment, a serious accident in light water reactors ... but with helium as coolant and the uranium bound in TRISO fuel only so minimal traces of activity escaped that nobody really cared ... it was such a great reactor concept, core-melt-immune and safe, that now China builds them after getting the techonolgy practically for free from Germany.... and here in Germany, the kWh in November costs 80 cent ... 😢
Tbh I think 1 is correct, not because of the actual issues though.
That is to say as you point out the actual event itself should be a 0, but the actual impact and ramifications of the event make it a meaningful event if only politically.
80cents, holy crap, in the Netherlands it's around 30 cents per kwh
And it's not okay to discharge, but braunkohl let's a lot more radioactive pollution loose
@@-allround- yeah, coal ash is super radioactive and we produce over 10million tons of it per year.
Meanwhile, the entire amount of spent fuel radioactive waste we've ever produced is less than 20k tons and would easily fit into a small Turnhalle.
I dont know who is your provider...but a quick check at lets say check 24 should give you a better deal.
Somewhere between 30-40 cents kw/h is the avarage.
Sad that entire industries, particularly one using thorium can be ground to a halt by such minimal occurrences like this incident and Three Mile Island.
Particularly ironic when you consider last year in the US alone, 470 /died/ in the petroleum industry.
Three Mile Island wasn't minimal. When they removed the rubble, they found corium in the lowest part of the container. Ten years after the incident.
@@gabbyn978 why yes, high temperatures did result in corium production as one would expect. However, the vast majority of the melt was contained within the pressure vessel of the reactor and none of it escaped the biological shield. Further, the release of radiation to the surrounding area was minimal.
All that being said, the safety features of American nuclear reactors have only gotten better in the past forty years. The minimal /exposure/ which occurred in 1979 was blown entirely out of proportion.
@@dragonboi20 People just don't get it. Three Mile Island was a massive fuck up on the part of the human operators, largely due to the control and computer interfaces turning out to be crap. AND THE INDUSTRY LEARNED THE LESSONS AND DESIGNED VASTLY BETTER INTERFACES. And so did other industries, too.
Also: quite a lot of balls in this video.
Had a ball watching this, thanks
There is a shut down nuclear power plant in Lubmin, Germany, then the largest power plant in the entire GDR (AKW Greifswald). Anyone can book a tour there and a very nice and old tour guide who actually used to work there and is very knowledgeable about this stuff will show you around the place and actually INTO a core itself, because there is a core that was built to about 80% when the nuclear decommissioning started in Germany. This means that core never saw water nor fuel, so it's not a hazard whatsoever. I have been there and it was probably to coolest fucking thing on the earth! Everything is out of stainless steel, even the walls! The effort and size of it is something everyone should experience in my opinion.
And it's a guided tour group of only about 15 people, which I find very tragic.
The Greifswald NPP reactors in operation had a substantial problem: the WWER reactor cores had too little insulating water between the outer fuel rods and the core drums. Thus, the radiation from the reaction made the steel brittle. By 1989, there were reports that said "unless the core drums are fixed, operation is risky and I'll-advised". As the WWER were typically less secure than the West-German EPR reactors, it was no hassle to put Greifswald NPP out of operation. Over 35 years later, the decontamination and teardown of the site is still going on.
@@CranialMalfunction The problem could be fixed with annealing the reactor vessel after a couple of years. This has been done on both blocks of Bohunice V-1 in Slovakia. The reactors and entire control system as well as the plant were inspected by western experts and the conclusion was that the plant is on equal safety operational level as similarly old reactors of "western" design (you can find an IAEA report on that). However, it had to shut down because of Austria, as they would block Slovakia to enter the EU if those blocks were not shut down. It was a political decision. Same as with Greifswald. Especiall the case of Block 5 and Block 6 which had the newer design (as Bohunice V-2) that is still operating in other power plants and will do so for the coming decades. The decision to close NPP Greifswald was a political one, as the reactors were perfectly safe in their time. Especially 5 and 6 could safely run today and produce clean electricity. There are many reactors of the VVER 440/213 type operating today and there have been never any accidents with this type. New reactor based on the VVER 440/213 are being built too. See NPP Mochovce block 3 and 4. Block 3 went into commercial production one year ago and Block 4 is expected to come online soon. Both are expected to operate into the 21st century. Practically, Greifswald Block 5 to 8 (if finished) could operate safely until the 2080s. But no, Germany decided to burn coal instead. Great move.
I was in there. Verry nice! (and it is free :-) ) Block 6 is it. Block 1 to 5 where used to produce energy. Block 5 only a few weeks. Block 1 and 2 did also heat the city Greifswald. The powerpland also owns his own raliway. (moving the personal between city and NPP)
@@erikziak1249 Bohunice V2 is still running, why are you complaining?
@erikziak1249 Erm... Nah. By 1989, there were internal reports (even West German companies were hired to evaluate the degradation of the reactor core hulls) stating that the older reactor core vessels are becoming too brittle due to the impacts of fast neutrons.
These reports and material analysis concluded that the core drums could break if large amounts of cold water had to be pumped into the reactor, e.g. during a critical leakage.
Is there a spot on the bingo card, probably the free space "human overrides the automatic controls"? Smh, I swear every single "accident" was someone doing so
Not always, but it was a critical art of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The difference is, Three Mile Island's PASSIVE systems still contained the accident, while Chernobyl's didn't.
I don't think this contributed much to the German Nuclear exit. There are significantly larger scandals and events that have happened inside and outside of Germany.
I always assumed you worked in Health and Safety, I wouldnt have guessed sound engineering.
Also, for a second I thought you were calling the chicken an idiot with a sound engineering degree.
😂😂I do work in health and safety the sound degree is pretty much unused!!
@PlainlyDifficult well I feel better about my guess now, and better about the health and safety conditions in southeast London.
@@PlainlyDifficult No way - I have two of your tapes, and I'd say that the sound degree is being put to beautiful use!
Does anyone know what the pig was all about?
@@johndemeritt3460making bacon 😮
"Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor" translates to "joint venture test reactor". It was the first prototype of an high temperature reactor (HTR) and it was specifically meant to test this new type of reactor and its quirks. The later THTR-300 is based on the AVR's design but was scaled up to a commercial production level and had improvements that fixed faults which came to light in prior tests on the AVR (namely the layout of pipes which meant the AVR's core would be exposed to water if a pipe broke, that's why the pipes of the steam generator are shifted to the side in the THTR-300).
The Shippingport plant in Pennsylvania actually operated for a portion of its life with a thorium "seed" blanket as a breeder reactor and was successful in generating more fuel than it consumed.
Oh shit, I am German and grew up in a fairly anti nuclear power family and I have never heard of this incident. Interesting video
10:11 RIP balls
I’d never heard of fuel balls before! Really enjoy these lesser known incidents being covered :)
Well there are a lot more reasons German stopped using nuclear power. For example German doesn't have a place to put spent fuel or to refine spent fuel to use it again. Also it's a rather labor intensive way of producing electricity. Solar, wind and storage are now the cheapest ways of producing electricity in Germany, and since the electricity market is kinda broken, it makes sense to produce your own power whenever you can. If you are lucky you get 8 cents per kWh for giving away your power, and have to buy it for 30-40 cents per kWh. In fact domestic battery storage is now 5 times as high as commercial one.
Germany has built a reprocessing plant. However there were protests against putting it in operation
@@brylozketrzyn They had cleared the area where it was planned from trees and protesters. But there where lawsuits going on and not much was actually build. It would have been to expensive to continue and they already knew that it most likely would be stopped sooner or later.
@@Ulrich.BierwischIndeed, renewables have gotten so cheap that electricity companies view nuclear fission plants as no longer commercially viable, and not just in Germany... In the US and UK projects to build new plants have been cancelled over and over, in other countries governments stepped in with huge subsidies financed from tax money...
@@jnievele It's already to expensive if it works like expected but it's not possible to get insurance in the case of an accident. Think about something like Chernobyl or Fukushima happens in the French reactor in Cattenom. Depending on the wind direction it's possible that Luxemburg, a whole country, has to be evacuated or the German state Saarland. How would this be compensated? What is the price tag of a whole country?
@Ulrich.Bierwisch Yep. Really only feasible if you want to use it produce Plutonium for nuclear weapons... But even that is expensive and dangerous, as Switzerland found out the hard way (another story few people know). Of course in Germany geography also played a major role... Like "Oh, let's place that new reactor in the scenic Rhine valley near Koblenz, not too many people there and it's far from the Iron Curtain... Wait, what do you mean that vulcano is still active, couldn't you have told us a few years earlier????"
With the ball feed system, into the reactor..... was going to type up why I thought this would be a problem, then I watched the rest of the video LOL thanks John