3 ms·
What is the risk of sabotage from someone working in and very knowledgeable about how the unit works?
by Gupie 5y ago
What is the risk of sabotage from someone working in and very knowledgeable about how the unit works?
- upsidesinclude 5y agoMinimal. You're talking about highly trained, licensed nuclear power engineers. That's a community in the US that can safely be estimated as 70% prior US Navy nuclear reactor techs and officers.
- bell-cot 5y agoConsidering how many thousands of minimally-protected water treatment plants there are, and how much publicity a serious sabotage job would get, and how extremely few reports there are of sabotage actually happening...
- XorNot 5y agoZero: small scale reactor designs like pebble bed reactors are designed as "set and forget" - they're intrinsically safe, and only need to be accessed when they need refueling. A model of deployment was that if you were setting up a town, you'd basically go dig a pit and lower one of these into it, pave over the top (or I suppose actually install some very heavy doors) and then build the town radially outwards from the reactor. The unit itself would be hermetically sealed - no employees, no systems to maintain. If it malfunctions or fails, then the idea is you drive out, pickup the container and drop a new one in.