British Heysham 2 nuclear reactor sets the world record for continuous operation.

[NNadir]

10. Britain had a Chernobyl like event at Windscale in the 1950's, 1957 to be exact.

In fact one of the first confirmations in the West that Chernobyl was actually happened was when the Soviet embassy reached out to the British for technical advice.

The reactor was graphite moderated, similar in many ways to the Chernobyl reactor.

If you listen to some of the assholes around here, you would believe that everyone in Britain died from radiation poisoning as a result.

This is certainly their position on Chernobyl, Chernobyl that in a rational world would be considered a minor event given that seventy million people die every decade from air pollution while stupid anti-nukes carry on mindlessly about the grand solar and wind nirvana that never came, isn't here, and never will come.

The United States had a number of graphite reactors, including the first one...built by Enrico Fermi.

Most graphite moderated reactors in the US were designed for the production of weapons grade plutonium, but one, the N reactor at Hanford, produced both weapons grade plutonium and electricity.

Any reactor that can be continuously fueled, including CANDU's, AGR and RBMK's is suitable for making weapons grade plutonium, although it must be said that such use is wasteful and in terms of isolating the plutonium, very expensive. The reason is that a nuclear weapon relies on a very low Pu²⁴⁰/Pu²³⁹ ratio which relies on short irradiation times and thus low plutonium concentrations. I am a supporter of the uranium/plutonium cycle, of course, but I'd like the world's inventory of plutonium to utilize the "Kessler solution" which is to adjust the isotopic vector to be rich in Pu²³⁸. I've actually dreamt of some very cool reactors that might do that, but, it's nothing.

After Chernobyl, the N reactor at Hanford was shut. The power was undoubtedly replaced by dangerous fossil fuels, which are killing people all around the planet 100% of the time, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every decade even as we speak.

However nobody cares about that. They worried that the N-reactor was dangerous, without asking the question "compared to what?"

I attended an interesting lecture recently at the Princeton Plasma Physics lab on why the Russians built graphite reactors. I always assumed that the purpose was to be dual use, weapons grade plutonium and electricity, but another reason, according to the speaker, was that the reactor was cheap to build.

It wasn't, unfortunately, idiot proof.

There are lots of idiots in the world, of course, including the reactionary idiots who sought to bet the planetary atmosphere on so called "renewable energy," without pausing to consider that the world abandoned "renewable energy" in the early 19th century on the grounds that most people led short miserable lives of dire poverty and um, because so called "renewable energy" wasn't actually renewable. There was something less than 6 billion fewer people when it was abandoned, and of course, none of them had gaudy junk like the stupid Tesla car to support with oodles of energy.

The lecture on why the Soviets built RBMK's is on line, and afterwards, I ask a question; it is easy to identify me by the nature of the question. The speaker is a "social scientist" and it, um, shows, but she's a rather nice and thoughtful woman nonetheless.

COLLOQUIUM: Inherently Risky Designs? The History of Soviet Nuclear Reactors and the Notion of Safety

Overall however, I'd have to confess that RBMK reactors, as much as we have learned how bad an idea they are, still saved lives that would have been lost were all the RBMK's not built.

The worst nuclear reactors are superior to the best dangerous fossil fuel plants.

I have a very different notion of "safety" than your average poorly educated and mindless anti-nuke, including the ones here I used to encounter until I wised up and put most of their ignorant asses on "ignore." It's bad enough that I've lived long enough to see my planet die for ignorance; there's no reason I should listen to bourgeois morons cheer for it.

It's not like anything I say or do is going to change anything. Fear and ignorance have won the day and the result is written in the atmosphere in clear and undeniable terms. At the end of July this year, as I noted in another thread, we were running more than 5 ppm higher in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide than we were last year.

Thanks for your comment.