Where to begin?
1.) Positive Temperature Coefficients are still a good idea. when you get out of the minor leagues, you'll learn that commercial PWR's have them at the beginning of each fuel cycle. It is the result of having high Boron concentrations in the coolant at BOL. The lower density of the coolant means lower density of the Boron, which has a greater effect on reactivity than the lower density of the water. It doesn't last long. Goes negative at about the time that Xenon hits equilibrium.
2.) Political reality is one thing. But are YOU going to issue an insurance policy for a new reactor? Are you going to invest BILLIONS into a plant that may never get a commercial license? Are you going to educate the approximately 349,998,450 people in this country who know nothing about nuclear power except what they see on CNN or The Amazing Colossal Man? They vote. The bankers and underwiters are among them too.
3.) March 1979 - the highest offsite dose rate during the TMI accident (which was MUCH tamer than it could have been if the plant had more than 90 EFPD on it at the time) was from the coal pile at Brunner Island down river. Did that make a difference? Nope. Nobody started new construction on a nuclear plant in over 30 years. You think THIS is not going to have that same effect? Seriously.
4.) I don't care who makes a profit from his work. As a capitalist, I believe that everyone should profit from his work - in direct proportion to the need for that work. I'm just being realistic. A short term need of a skill that is easily taught will not result in new millionaires from among the HP Tech. ranks. It only takes a few weeks to fully train someone to survey, take smears and air samples, and to frisk rubble. I'm guessing that there a lot of Japanese people who can pick up and run with that.
5.) No, the nuclear industry won't go away quickly. By its nature it will take a long time to put it all away. But, don't delude yourself into thinking that it is going to grow any time soon, and the newest nuclear plant in this country is over 25 years old - some are well into their license exensions. They ain't gonna last forever. TMI didn't stop nuclear power. It just stopped it from growing a millimeter in a generation. Chernobyl was argued away a a fluke that can't happen here. With so many of the same design power plants as Fukushima Daiichi operating right in our hometowns, that argument will not work this time.
6.) It was NOT an earthquake that caused the current situation. It was NOT a tsunami either. It was NOT a combination of the two. It was a loss of power to a few pumps. Suddenly, it is no longer a freak of nature any more. Anything designed by humans, built by humans, and operated by humans, can and will fail.
We talked for years about redundancy (a grammatical error that doesn't bear discussing here), defense-in-depth, probabilistic risk assessment, etc., but when your "backups to backups to backups" are all located on the same piece of real estate, and you didn't postulate as possible that which actually happened, well ... fuhgedaboudit brudda. If one "statistically impossible" disaster can happen once, then another can happen somewhere else.
Yes, the world SHOULD build new reactors and operate them. Yes, nuclear power is safe - even when the plants fail epically like these did - and environmentally responsible. As long as we RE-THINK design, defenses, and contingencies, new reactors won't have to bear the burden of the old assumptions, which we are turning out to be woefully invalid, new reactors SHOULD be built. Now, go out and convince that 349,998,450 people of that and you're home free.
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