Engineers in China have successfully designed and demonstrated a full-scale commercial nuclear reactor that is capable of passively and automatically cooling itself. This design eliminates the risk of catastrophic “meltdowns”, putting to rest longstanding green fears about the disaster at Chernobyl being repeated. The development gives perspective to the new Government’s claims that they will make Britain a “clean energy superpower by 2030”. For decades, U.K. policymakers have run around like headless chickens, making hollow promises about a “green industrial revolution”, but our energy prices have skyrocketed and our nuclear sector is in disarray. A new reactor along the same lines as the Chinese ones could have been developed here in the U.K., but for green ideology dominating the energy policy agenda.
According to the New Scientist, the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) in Shandong, which began operations in December, recently tested its passive safety design by simply switching the plant off. In a conventional reactor, this would risk a meltdown. But instead, the HTR-PM simply cooled naturally. Safety systems, some of them passive, have been around for a long time. But this innovation leaves even less to mishap.
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