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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 RUclips is all about!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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...
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
It's really hard to argue that bailing out of ex-Soviet-led reactors was a bad idea, but as so often happens they threw out the baby with the bathwater by bailing out of fission reactors entirely.
I think the saying this triggered Germany to bail on fission is not really accurate. The Chernobyl incident itself had a much bigger impact on public opinion and boosted the anti-nuclear movement, but even that did not lead to Germany's departure from it. Only 10 years later in 2000 was an actual plan to exit fission (over the span of 20 years) passed in the german parliament. It was under the first government that the green party was part of. The greens of course were the party that heavily advocated for the position of that movement. A later conservative government under Merkel 10 years later actually wanted to get rid of it and was busy making modifications to delay shutting down plants - until Fukushima went poof. It was then public pressure that forced them to go through with it. If Fukushima hadn't happen, they'd for sure have at least watered the exit plan down or done away with it all together.
Interesting.. I remember doing some sketch work on a thorium reactor design about 20 years ago.. with liquid fluoride and fuel (thorium and uranium) as the fast loop and sodium for the coolant loop, everything in titanium and the whole setup within an inert gas chamber with handling locks etc.. only useful for a large country with plenty of thorium and decent rutile deposits..
As a Thames Valley resident on the South Oxon / West Berks border I have always wondered about what happened in Harwell. The site near Chilton ajacent to the Harwell business park, Rutherford Labs, Diamond Light Source and Fermi labs suffered some event leading to its closure and to this day it is safeguarded by armed military guards. Local rumours include a "China Crisis" type event which was encapsulated in vast quantities of concrete and placed under military safeguarding indefinitely. Sounds like a story right up your street.
This was not the first time a reactor in germany caused trouble. Reactor Gundremmingen A suffered a total economic loss in 1977, when a short caused the reactor building to be flooded with radioactive water.
The bigger problem was the company blamed the radiation on Tschernobyl but you could tell it was Thorium Radiation not from the RBMK. Thats what killed actually the biggest science investment from NRW. The building is still there and 2 engineers look after it. Also to notice the area has a higher rate of Leukemia. Since years they try to eastblish a leukemia cluster. My grandmas sister lived near to it the whole neighbourhood was full of cancer cases. all died of some sort of cancer in the area.
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. 😢
Thank you so much for this quick review, and timely as follows. I am very interested in the new SMR Xe-100 (US, UK, Canada) and this historical review of the similar TRISO fueled pebble non-homogenous (fuel pebbles and control pebbles) experimental THTR-300 pebble-bed reactor is very informative in comparison. Yes there were probably too many variables in the THTR-300 reactor vessel operation, and hokey manual and automatic operation; so now we know how to do only much safer lab-level experiments. Sadly a $2B expensive lesson being managed. Hopefully the recent modern GenIV reactor designs have learned all the lessons. The _new_ HALEU TRISO or TRISO-X fuel is different but similar with elements changing in each ~1mm kernel.
Phillips 66 oil refinery in Lincolnshire has a wide history of disasters. From a steam valve release causing two workers with horrific burns in 2000 to the 2001 Easter Monday explosion. Also next door is another refinery called Lindsey oil refinery which in 2010 had a pipe ruptured when the crew cut the pipe after told it was safe. One sadly didn’t survive. Phillips66 Lincolnshire also had an oil or diesel leak which started a plant wide fire i think in the 1990’s but all information on the web has been lost. I do still have a newspaper from my dad who worked on the plant during the fire but it’s in the attic.
After the explosion on 2001 they had to install a community alarm system to warn the village if an incident was likely to affect the village… yeah they didn’t have a village alarm until ordered by H&S after the explosion. Both refineries are dodgy and has had constant issues with either coal trains derailed, fuel tank farm overfilled, one fuel tank imploded while pump was cleaning out vapours, monthly gas leak site alarms. Also poor security as they have a public split between a refinery and the thank farm with only a wire fence as security protection.
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????"
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.
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.
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.
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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...
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
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
"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....
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.
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.
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
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
Balls breaking under high pressure release toxic radioactive gas? Who knew?
🤣😂🤣😂💀☢️💀☢️
Thtr made it through no nut November 😂
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
5:11 missed opportunity to insert a guy with a „balls“ speech bubble
Also mised the traditional graphic for "side note".
My Saturday morning is not complete until I've seen a Plainly Difficult video with Balls. Thanks, John!
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
The "Oh Balls" guy we see in most PD videos must love this particular video
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.
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.
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
This is the highlight of the week. Cheers from Sweden!
Thank you!!
Ja det är det!!
Sir, your videos are top notch. A true professional. Congratulations on success!
Thank you!
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.
Saying "Oopsie" heals any oopsie.
😂😂
Even an RBMK sized oopsie?
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
That dry cooling tower is amazing tho. Excuse me, I meant "amazeballs".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 RUclips is all about!
_"More balls plz"_ famous last words
Forbidden ball pit.
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...
One of my favorite channels; keep up the amazing work!
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.
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.
3:42 That the thumbs-up hand is shaking nervously 😂 it's these subtle things that make this channel top-notch! 😂😂
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?
Balls!
Gotta love a sphere
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 😮
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.
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.
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..
Also: quite a lot of balls in this video.
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.
Super grateful for the animations in this one. I can't imagine following along with words alone!
I guess you could say that reactor was BALLS
As a german I can judge this and it was plainly stupid to exit nuclear power production and we are paying hard for this in these times.
Hopefully waiting for the recent GenIV reactors (similar Xe-100 pebble bed) will be worth the wait. Similarly in many western countries.
Another banger from plainly difficult ready on my lunch break. Thanks again John.
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.
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
ah, I was waiting for this one....
I read up on this a few years ago, looking at pebble bed reactors. There’s so much potential in the design here.
Thanks for another great video, always look forward to your thoughtful and well-made videos.
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!
German here who never heard of this. Neat
7.29 'Terrible diagram by John'
🤣😂🤣😂
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 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.
Love your content!
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...
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
Wow a Forium ballpit!
What an elegant cooling tower suspended from a central pylon. Exquisite.
Nobody dies and no damage at a nuclear accident: *Complete Hysteria*
Regular injury, deaths and lingering health problems at coal: *crickets*
And over here in South Africa we have Koeberg.
Nightmare fuel. Not sure how long it will be before somethibg Chernobyl happens there. 😢
It's really hard to argue that bailing out of ex-Soviet-led reactors was a bad idea, but as so often happens they threw out the baby with the bathwater by bailing out of fission reactors entirely.
I think the saying this triggered Germany to bail on fission is not really accurate. The Chernobyl incident itself had a much bigger impact on public opinion and boosted the anti-nuclear movement, but even that did not lead to Germany's departure from it. Only 10 years later in 2000 was an actual plan to exit fission (over the span of 20 years) passed in the german parliament. It was under the first government that the green party was part of. The greens of course were the party that heavily advocated for the position of that movement. A later conservative government under Merkel 10 years later actually wanted to get rid of it and was busy making modifications to delay shutting down plants - until Fukushima went poof. It was then public pressure that forced them to go through with it. If Fukushima hadn't happen, they'd for sure have at least watered the exit plan down or done away with it all together.
Interesting.. I remember doing some sketch work on a thorium reactor design about 20 years ago.. with liquid fluoride and fuel (thorium and uranium) as the fast loop and sodium for the coolant loop, everything in titanium and the whole setup within an inert gas chamber with handling locks etc.. only useful for a large country with plenty of thorium and decent rutile deposits..
Love your videos could watch them for hours. You should cover the 1977 granville rail disaster
5:20 BALLS😂😂😂😂😂😂
BALLS!
Oh wait...we have actual balls this time.
As a Thames Valley resident on the South Oxon / West Berks border I have always wondered about what happened in Harwell. The site near Chilton ajacent to the Harwell business park, Rutherford Labs, Diamond Light Source and Fermi labs suffered some event leading to its closure and to this day it is safeguarded by armed military guards. Local rumours include a "China Crisis" type event which was encapsulated in vast quantities of concrete and placed under military safeguarding indefinitely. Sounds like a story right up your street.
Thanks for the video. I live near this power plant. Thanks for covering this story
This was not the first time a reactor in germany caused trouble.
Reactor Gundremmingen A suffered a total economic loss in 1977, when a short caused the reactor building to be flooded with radioactive water.
By far the biggest difficulty with nuclear power is spineless politicians and mindless nimbys. Discuss!😂
1986...I have come to realize was a tough year for this old world...everywhere.
The bigger problem was the company blamed the radiation on Tschernobyl but you could tell it was Thorium Radiation not from the RBMK. Thats what killed actually the biggest science investment from NRW. The building is still there and 2 engineers look after it.
Also to notice the area has a higher rate of Leukemia. Since years they try to eastblish a leukemia cluster. My grandmas sister lived near to it the whole neighbourhood was full of cancer cases. all died of some sort of cancer in the area.
I'd love to see you do a video about the Callide unit C4 incident.
BALLS!!
Snug as a Bug hiding from the Snow in Scotland! 😂👌
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. 😢
Thank you so much for this quick review, and timely as follows.
I am very interested in the new SMR Xe-100 (US, UK, Canada) and this historical review of the similar TRISO fueled pebble non-homogenous (fuel pebbles and control pebbles) experimental THTR-300 pebble-bed reactor is very informative in comparison. Yes there were probably too many variables in the THTR-300 reactor vessel operation, and hokey manual and automatic operation; so now we know how to do only much safer lab-level experiments.
Sadly a $2B expensive lesson being managed.
Hopefully the recent modern GenIV reactor designs have learned all the lessons.
The _new_ HALEU TRISO or TRISO-X fuel is different but similar with elements changing in each ~1mm kernel.
Had a ball watching this, thanks
I think you have a pretty sound understanding of the engineering in this video.
Phillips 66 oil refinery in Lincolnshire has a wide history of disasters. From a steam valve release causing two workers with horrific burns in 2000 to the 2001 Easter Monday explosion. Also next door is another refinery called Lindsey oil refinery which in 2010 had a pipe ruptured when the crew cut the pipe after told it was safe. One sadly didn’t survive.
Phillips66 Lincolnshire also had an oil or diesel leak which started a plant wide fire i think in the 1990’s but all information on the web has been lost. I do still have a newspaper from my dad who worked on the plant during the fire but it’s in the attic.
After the explosion on 2001 they had to install a community alarm system to warn the village if an incident was likely to affect the village… yeah they didn’t have a village alarm until ordered by H&S after the explosion. Both refineries are dodgy and has had constant issues with either coal trains derailed, fuel tank farm overfilled, one fuel tank imploded while pump was cleaning out vapours, monthly gas leak site alarms. Also poor security as they have a public split between a refinery and the thank farm with only a wire fence as security protection.
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????"
I love glowing informarion, that's why I'm here!
I've been saying it for such a long time, ever since I saw this video, that oh so famous Safety Director ruined Germany's Nuclear Industry.
"...The GLOWING information..." You KNOW it's going to be good!
Very Interesting video of a reactor of "unknown" (my words) type.🤔
Someone said watch this and hold my beer I am going to figure out the most complex system to feed a nuclear reactor…
Must have been someone that loved playing with marbles as a kid!
Kansas State University TRIGA reactor was hit by a tornado in 2008, I was there... It would make a good April 1st (Fools Day) video.
Balls
Thank you
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.
Balls, what a disaster. :) Thank you and have a great week.
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.
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.
Thank you for your hard work and talent. Your videos are always a delight.💶⛳️🦊
Thanks!
Thank you!!
A Pig and a chicken this week!
Thanks John 😎🐖🐓
May I request you cover the Abbeystead disaster? My aunt and uncle had been invited that evening but didn't go.
The operator’s reaction to the accident really needed a “Balls!” caption. lol