Comment 61883

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted April 05, 2011 at 16:41:27 in reply to Comment 61880

That depends on the risk. According to some, they're much less likely to suffer a serious meltdown than a light-water reactor. This seems to me to be more of a question of the technicalities involved in the term "meltdown" than a real guarantee of safety. There was a very serious incident back in the fifties in Chalk River with a NRX model (precursor to the CANDU), and it played out much like Fukushima (minus the earthquake/tsunami) - hydrogen explosions, coolant leaks, etc.

The biggest risk people associate with CANDU reactors is that they're very good for covertly enriching weapons-grade material. They can be refuelled without being shut down and run on plutonium fuel, both of which make them good choices for a weapons program. This association isn't helped by the fact that AECL exports reactors primarily to shady second-world nations with nuclear aspirations like India, China or Pakistan. India's first bomb was created with materials enriched in an NRX reactor, bought from Canada and thoroughly subsidized by our taxpayers.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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