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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Great, and ideally gravity can be used to move it. Remember, at Fukushima power to the pumps was lost.

It also helps to not be running a reactor based on designs from the 1950s and then decades later ignore all the known potential problems.

It does, but it makes sense to explore fail-safe designs.

Depending on a lack of incompetence in dangerous systems works until it doesn't. To the extent that these things can simply halt when incompetently managed, they should.

If anyone disagrees, I'd like to know why they think the next hundred years are going to be so much freer of political shortsightedness and corruption than the last hundred.

Fukishima is a perfect example. Unit 1 had been retrofitted with an isolation condenser, which should have been able to prevent a meltdown even with no power, but it wasn't activated, for reasons that remain murky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_condensor

Sounds like a quite simple design indeed, and only one valve opening away from use?

Nothing has to move it. It’s in a pool and always there. The pool is big enough to sink all of the decay heat of the reactors it hosts, without needing a refill or heat exchange.

The article states the whole reactor will be submerged in a pool of water, making it passively safe.

Reactor cores continue to produce waste heat when shut down, and water evaporates. It’s passively safe till you run out of coolant, then it’s actively dangerous.

In this case the pool boils off slowly enough from thermal load to let decay heat reduce to the point where air cooling is adequate. So it remains passively safe unless there is a sudden loss of water from the pool.

Engineering a very resilient pond does not feel like as complex a problem as engineering highly complex cooling systems to be resilient.

And if you size the pool right it will by cool before the pool boils off. It's simple math and engineering.

The reactor is submerged in the pool. It’s a passive design.

Afaik some reactor designs drop the core in a tank below in case of emergency.

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