Chernobyl Revisited

I have to second this; she has a great read about Chernobyl, and her data is quite accurate, as far as I can tell.Chernobyl often makes me wonder about pebble bed reactors, the planned "next generation" of nuclear reactors. While they don't have an issue in which moderation remains constant while cooling decreases as water boils to steam (as in graphite moderated reactors like Chernobyl), pebble bed reactors share two common features: They do use graphite as a moderator, and they have no containment structure (like kept three mile island from being far worse than it was).While pebble bed reactors are designed to have the pellets not be capable of reaching temperatures high enough to cause meltdown (in a rather ingenous way - they get larger the hotter they get, which increases their surface area and decreases their reaction rate), if a graphite fire were to occur (due to steam or air getting into the main chamber, and bad luck), and the fire retardation system failed (due to some failure of redundancy or whatnot), it could be another Chernobyl.It kinda scares me... I wish there was a way to take graphite out of the picture alltogether. Nuclear grade graphite isn't supposed to burn; however, as we saw in Chernobyl, it certainly is *possible*. China is planing to build a ton of PBMRs to meet their expanding power needs.On the other hand, coal is killing us too, so....

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."