Technology
PUBLISHED
A neglected genre of television that we need to reboot immediately is: crashing a dangerous thing into another thing and watching the ensuing explosion.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.In 2012, producers in the UK, the US, and Germany did just this, purchasing a Boeing 727 and then smashing it into a dried up lakebed in Mexico to answer the age-old question: Where should you sit during a plane crash if your overall goal is to survive?
In 1984, TV producers answered another classic question on everyone's lips: What would happen if you smashed a train into nuclear flask at around 160 kilometers (100 miles) an hour?
On July 17, 1984, millions of people around the world tuned in to watch just that. Meanwhile, a crowd of around 2,000 invited guests got a more direct view, watching as the British Rail Class 46 locomotive hurtled towards the flask, in order to test the flask's safety.
So what are nuclear "flasks" or "casks" anyway? Should nuclear waste be at nuclear facilities, or buried deep in some horrible nuclear tomb, not to be opened for 1,000 years? Well, kinda. But it does also need transporting every now and then, for example to be processed elsewhere, and when the need arises the waste products are typically transported in these giant flasks, often on the backs of trains.
"They are typically made from 25-cm-thick [about 10 inches] forged steel and weigh around 100 tonnes. They can hold up to five tonnes of nuclear material," Pacific Nuclear Transport, Ltd explains. "The casks facilitate the movement of nuclear material by different modes of transport, protect workers from radiation, dissipate heat efficiently and are designed to withstand severe accidents."
And boy, as millions learned in 1984, can they withstand accidents. Put one of these beauties up against a train going 100 miles an hour, and we wouldn't bet on the train.
As expected, after a 12.9-kilometer (8-mile) runup, the train hit the nuclear flask and was obliterated. More reassuringly, the flask remained intact, losing very little pressure during the deliberate crash.
So what did we learn from this? Not a whole lot that couldn't have been found out through more conventional tests, but the point of the crash was as a demonstration to the public that nuclear material could safely be transported across the country.
"These flasks are ultra, ultra safe," Walter Marshall, chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, said in a TV interview shortly after the crash. "People shouldn't worry at all about the transport of spent fuel."
"The general public really ought to be satisfied. I mean it's been expensive, but I think they ought to be satisfied and and that makes it worth it," he added.
While it is unclear how many people worried about nuclear waste would be fully converted to the idea after watching a train smash into it expensively, protests around transport have died down in the intervening years.
Meanwhile, a lot of nuclear waste has been transported across the UK.
“In 2014, Public Health England estimated that, each year, approximately 110,000 transport containers were moved on the road, with 1,500 moved on the rail network," Sarah Bryson, a Transportation Specialist with Nuclear Waste Services explained to South Copeland GDF Community Partnership, a nuclear disposal facility.
“They have all occurred without a single major safety incident, since nuclear transport began in the 1960s. This unblemished safety record is due to robust management and packages undergo rigorous testing to ensure they remain safe no matter what happens to them."
More conventional testing, she added, involved dropping the casks from various heights, and subjecting them to temperatures of up to 800°C (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit).
1