Nuclear Safety

The book I read to research this post was Nuclear Safety by Gianni Petrangelli which is an excellent book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is about the safety measures in place primarily in nuclear power stations in the western world although it does contrast it with places like Chernobyl. It also looks at some of the accidents they have had like with 3 Mile Island & Sellafield. The earliest example of a nuclear reactor was built in 1942 and was basically inserting caesium rods into a mass of uranium and pushing the rods further in to increase power and withdrawing them to reduce. That type of producing nuclear power is called fission and that type of nuclear power station was called a fermi pile. In fact even though there have been advances in power station technology that is the basic system of how they work. Most nuclear stations are built to withstand an impact of a fighter jet collision and because at one time they had concerns over crashes with Lockhead F104 Starfighters they are the standard one it has to withstand. Hardly any power stations would withstand a collision with a Boeing 747 as it would have to be built deep underground & they are considered much less likely to crash. In the incident at Chernobyl a new device had just been installed and they reduced the power to an unacceptably low amount, not realising it was dangerous as part of testing it. The power station worked at an optimal amount that they shouldn't have devated from. Most nuclear power certainly in the west are built to withstand a moderate eathquake and even a nuclear explosion from a nearby missile. Much of the construction is reinforced concrete and the reactor is normally built in a shell within a shell called a safety cage for added protection. I really enjoyed reading which is around 420 pages and contains no less than 17 appendixes. It's also a very interesting subject in it's own right.