On 12/17/2016 7:18 PM, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artículo ,
newshound escribió:

Slightly lazy journalism I thought

Yes, agreed.

, centred on "lack of primary
containment"

Chernobyl had no primary containment; that incident would have been
nowhere near as bad with PC.

The other point, of course, is that at any time some plant has to be the
"most dangerous"

Aye.

. Quite reassuring that it is 40 years old and unlikely
to continue operating for much longer. Also, not unreasonable for plant
in poorer countries to be built to lower standards

40-year-old standards, yes. At least it'll hopefully not be online much
longer. I couldn't help wondering why they didn't restart reactor 1 as
well.

No, also lower standards. Partly to reflect different risk levels in
less populated countries, but also cost benefit. We've always been very
critical of the Chernobyl design, a UK review in the early 70's
concluded that RBMK wasn't licensable here, in part because of
controllablity. But the Soviet republics were behind the west in site
welding technology for large pressure vessels. The RBMK allows more
factory manufacturing, with field assembly using relatively conventional
welding. Also, it was scaleable. And their regional economy was even
more held back by lack of electricity than the UK one was. I am less
familiar with the VVER, but see no reason to doubt that the Soviet
designers looked at trade-offs in the same way that we did. After all,
they seemed to have designed Metsamor against an appropriate level of
earthquake for the Armenia.