3 ms·
This is so silly, it might be just a form of trolling. A nuclear power plant is a nuclear rector plus a thermal power plant, i.e. a turbine. Even if the safety
by credit_guy 2y ago
This is so silly, it might be just a form of trolling.
A nuclear power plant is a nuclear rector plus a thermal power plant, i.e. a turbine. Even if the safety of the reactor is 100%, what happens if there's an accident with the turbine? How do you perform maintenance? Sure, you have elevators to move people up and down, but how do you move things that are several tons up and down? A typical fuel rod assembly is about 4-5 meters long. The efficiency of the thermal power plant is about 30%, which means you need to dispose of 70% of the heat coming from the reactor. With regular nuclear power plants you use cooling towers; how are you going to do this when you are 1 mile underground? Do you install some pipes that bring cold water from the surface? Sounds reasonable until you do the math and find out you need to move 10 tons per second. The pumps that need to push the water up will need to fight the gravity of a column of water one mile high and push 10 tons each second. The math is not that difficult (potential energy = mgh), such pumps need to have a power of about 150 MW. That's ignoring the friction of the water in the pipe. But that's a big thing to ignore for a mile-long pipe. Oh, and the pressure at the bottom is 165 bar, about the same as the pressure in the reactor. You can avoid this huge pressure by creating moving the water up and down in stages, but that complicates the engineering, and increases the construction and maintenance cost.