Quote:
Originally Posted by wayner
Obviously compared to that ,Chernobyl got way out of hand for many reasons, but three mile island had the potential to have been much worse
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Not even close. Chernobyl went prompt critical. It literally became a nuclear bomb. TMI had no chance of that happening. Light water moderated reactors slow down when the water boils off, by design, as a safety feature. Chernobyl has a positive temperature coefficient. And it had no containment dome.
And sorry to get into politics, but the difference is a dictatorship (socialist) and a democratic-republic. The USSR wanted nuclear weapons at any cost. They knew that to have nuclear weapons meant they could not be attacked. This is why North Korea developed nukes and why the Iranians are hell bent on the same track. Once you have nukes, the chance someone will do a conventional attack against you is near zero.
The Soviets cut corners on EVERYTHING. They took the carbon moderated reactor for plutonium production and used it for power generation.
I am not saying the US was perfect and pure. Hannaford is still a mess. But everything in the USSR was 2 to 3 orders of magnitude worse.