Comments by "Adam Bainbridge" (@AdamMGTF) on "What Ever Happened to 3 Mile Island? - 42 years later" video.

  1. yes they can, infact they power submarines. However it would not be practical to place reactors under water for power generation. Not only would it cost a lot, there is no benefit and plenty of negatives
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  2.  @spondoolie6450  I see where your coming from. The problems are various, its why this idea was considered and rejected in the early 50s. The thing with cooling is that you don't just want "cooling" but heat exchange. That's how the power is generated. So you'd still need a conventional reactor, inside a building that's isolated from the sea..... So you've just made the engineering challenge (therefore cost) way harder, with no engineering benefit. In addition, you now have to have a way of workers, working in an undersea environment. Plus, your building materials have to take into account salt water corrosion. So that's making the costs increase even more. Now you have to work out a safe way for fuel and supplies to move to the plant. Another issue is that you lose power in transmission. That's why power plants are spread out. Otherwise 1 massive powerplant per county would be possible* Finally. As for safety ie if the reactor had issues its under the sea. Problem there is, sea life is needed to eat. Poisoning a major food source (one we can't herd) isn't a great idea. Add to that issues with cleanup incase of disaster and the threat of tsunami etc and your creating more problems than you had hope of solving. So yeh.... That's why the top minds didn't go for such an idea when nuclear power was first used. I hope that doesn't come across as condescending. As I do not mean it that way at all. Just that in cases like this, i always start by thinking "the best minds haven't tried this, there must be a reason why, what is that reason?".
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  3. "convenient" it was not, infact it was a big contributor to the confusion and hysteria at the time. Had it come out years earlier (or later), it probably would have helped calm the situation down. It was an unfortunate coincidence. Incidentally, and rather ironically, the disaster in the movie is not only nothing like what happened at TMI, but was completely fictional. The sort of accident in the movie just can't happen.
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