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This title is extremely misleading. Makes it sounds like there has been a nuclear accident, and subtly stokes fears of nuclear technology.
by kalaracey 10y ago
This title is extremely misleading. Makes it sounds like there has been a nuclear accident, and subtly stokes fears of nuclear technology.
- aetherson 10y agoGuys. It's a pun. This how article titles work. Welcome to the last 50 years of American journalism.
- castis 10y agoHN has been on an extreme title pedantry kick for a bit now. Hoping it cools off a little.
- stock_toaster 10y agoWhat is the expected half-life of the cooling period?
- exabrial 10y agoI thought the pun was obvious; after all, that would be a waste of unspent material.....
- jefurii 10y ago"Extreme pedantry"! I like the sound of that! Makes me want to listen to some MC Frontalot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7sKhHPKqAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7sKhHPKqAc
- vacri 10y agoThese kinds of puns have been around nearly as long as newspapers themselves.
- Dylan16807 10y agoThe pun is fine. The noun/verb confusion on 'claims' is an issue.
- tbrownaw 10y agoBut how would a reactor claim anything?
- Dylan16807 10y agoYou can omit "a spokesman for".
- yongjik 10y agoMelting Molten Salt Reactor Claim Claims Yet Another Startup as Casualty?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stagbeetle 10y agoMolten Salt Reactor claims "It was I who allowed the alliance to know the location of the shield generator."
- velodrome 10y agoExcept molten salt reactors (MSRs) do NOT have meltdowns.
- acidburnNSA 10y agoRight... "they're already melted!" as the adage goes. They do exhibit passive decay heat removal, which is a major safety advantage allowing for walk-away safety. The thing that has not been demonstrated at commercial scale yet though is whether or not the already-melted fuel can be contained properly without plating out all over the heat exchangers, etc. I'm sure it can be done. Just will take some patience.
- socialist_coder 10y agoI guess it sounds like there has been an accident if you read it with "claims" being the verb of the sentence. But that doesn't seem right... molten salt reactors don't exist (yet), so how could they melt down? Plus, why would a reactor be claiming that it's melting down? I dunno, very weird. So, if you read it again, you can see that another way to parse the sentence is with "claims" as the noun and "melt down" as the verb. Now it's makes perfect sense because molten salt reactors are still in experimental form. I dunno, seems like a fine title to me. Maybe you are not actually reading every word from the title?
- Dylan16807 10y ago> molten salt reactors don't exist (yet), so how could they melt down? Yes they do. > Plus, why would a reactor be claiming that it's melting down? Maybe they were lying before? It's definitely confusing, but the title parses correctly that way, so it's not obvious that a different word is the verb.
- calebfenton 10y agoI'm totally ignorant but I thought all modern reactors had negative temperature coefficients and slowed down as they heated up? Are MSRs less likely to melt down? Why do people say they don't?
- fnordfnordfnord 10y agoMSR's have a fail-safe design. One might still have a containment breach, but probably only through sabotage.
- acidburnNSA 10y agoNegative temperature coefficients of reactivity matter to keep an operating reactor stable and prevent rapid overpower accidents a'la Chernobyl. All modern reactors exhibit this characteristic. However, the vast majority of risk in reactors today is that the fission energy doesn't all come out at the moment of fission. Some of it (roughly 7%) comes out after shutdown as exponentially-decaying radiation of the fission products. This decay heat (as it's called) is the primary safety hazard of today's reactors because there's enough of it to breach the reactor vessel if something goes wrong (a'la Fukushima). The Fukushima chain reaction shut down perfectly after the earthquake. The decay heat removal systems failed after the tsunami came along. The decay heat melted the fuel and cladding without cooling. MSRs and other advanced reactors have passive decay heat removal by making use of different coolants (molten salt, liquid metal, etc.) and natural circulation air heat exchangers.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Taniwha 10y agoyes confusing - I actually read it as they had done a test meltdown to prove it's safe