Nuclear plants occupy an unusual spot in the towns where they operate: integral but so much in the background that they may seem almost invisible. But when they close, it can be like the earth shifting underfoot.
Lohud.com, the Gannett newspaper that covers the Lower Hudson Valley in New York,
took a look around at the experience of towns where reactors have closed, because the Indian Point reactors in Buchanan are scheduled to be shut down under an agreement with Gov. Mario Cuomo.
From sea to shining sea, it was dismal. It wasn’t just the plant employees who were hurt. The losses of hundreds of jobs, tens of millions of dollars in payrolls and millions in property taxes depressed whole towns and surrounding areas. For example:
Vernon, Vermont, home to Vermont Yankee for more than 40 years, had to cut its municipal budget in half. The town closed its police department and let the county take over; the youth sports teams lost their volunteer coaches, and Vernon Elementary School lost th…
Comments
In order for ... U-235 to work, a sample of uranium must be enriched ...
... To build a nuclear reactor, what you need is some mildly enriched uranium.
That's wrong both times he says it: heavy water reactors run on unenriched uranium, as do Magnox ones.
Typically, the uranium is formed into pellets
Just plain uranium? Not uranium oxide?
... The bundles are then typically submerged in water inside a pressure vessel. The water acts as a coolant. In order for the reactor to work, the bundle, submerged in water, must be slightly supercritical. That means that, left to its own devices, the uranium would eventually overheat and melt.
Does the water act only as a coolant? Does increasingly hot uranium -- oxide -- not become less reactive, and therefore "typically" level off its own fission rate, and with that, its temperature, well short of melting?
The author was informed of these difficulties shortly after May 26, 2006, that I know of, but the page hasn't changed since then, and apparently not since 2000.
One can do better here. The same enrichment-is-necessary error was present, but the author corrected it when I complained.
I think one can do better still; maybe I'll get around to taking a shot at it someday. (Aren't there better primer pages than either of these, already?)
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas