The story has been written up here:

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor, by Ken Silverstein, Villard; First Edition edition (January 11, 2004), ISBN-10: 081296660, ISBN-13: 978-0812966602

I have known everything there is to know about hazardous waste disposal since I was seven years old, and brought a jellyfish home from the beach in six buckets. You just have to get used to the smell.

Well you laugh but you know that an American Boy Scout did actually try to build one in his backyard. He wanted the badge. I didn’t even know the Scouts gave them out for reactor construction. Given the amount of radioactive waste he seems to have produced it looks like he did a pretty good job of it too.

I’ve bought the concrete, dug a hole in the back yard, and I’ve got five thousand pencils to use as moderators. It’ll be all done by next summer. In fact I’m buying the nails next week.

Everything is absolutely under control, and you’se all have nothing at all to worry about, ‘cept if I have one of my funny turns just as it all goes critical.

Yeah, them’s a tricky lot in Canukistan. Most Western reactors have concrete containment shields. But it is not really a design issue with the reactor is it? The much older CO2 cooled reactors Britain used to use didn’t have such shields, yet we had no problems with them. The RMBK design always had problems and were forever leaking.

The one design issue I can think of is that the Canadians and the Soviets both wanted on-line refueling so the reactor did not have to be shut down. The Canadians cut their fuel rods into short pieces and inserted them horizontally – the tubes ran from side to side. The Soviets kept their fuel rods long and inserted them vertically. Which meant they needed a crane. The height of the building needed for the crane meant that they could not build a concrete shield even if they had wanted to – and they probably didn’t as they are expensive. Which makes me wonder what the British did – we built a reactor that owed a lot to the CANDU but the tubes were vertical and it was cooled by light water – the Steam-Generating Heavy Water Reactor. Anyone been to their site to see if they have a proper containment building? I would guess not.

So maybe I would have to concede design played a role. Still, putting steam near graphite is, I think most people would agree, a bad idea. Not as bad as putting molten sodium near steam which most Fast Breeders, in Britain, France, America, Japan and the Soviet Union, did. But bad enough.

If we get any new reactors I hope we buy some CANDUs from Canada.

You introduce C.N.D for some reason of your own. (One might just as easily bring in the A.A. or R.A.C. or Mr Jeremy Clarkson, but no matter. It is your choice.) C.N.D. is the ‘Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’ whose views on global warming, the ostensible subject of this thread, are unknown to me. I suspect they may have one but what of that? Among the ‘useful’ fools’ today must be counted then Richard M. Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and others, all of whom were involved in nuclear proliferation talks aimed at reducing nuclear weapons. Why, pray, is it wrong to do this if one is ‘left wing’ (pace Mr Obama) and commenable if one is right wing?

Now, how do I get my hands on the Soviet gold?

Well why not? Especially given those complaints are so serious:

“The design put forward by Westinghouse, the American firm now owned by Toshiba of Japan, is also criticised, with the HSE saying the safety case on internal hazards has “significant shortfalls”….. It also complains that the reactor design was submitted in feet and inches rather than metric figures.”

Her govt made it clear to physicists, climatologists that there was money on the table to prove man-made fossil fuel emissions were causing global warming. That’s when the whoring of the physical sciences to promote AGW began in the Western world – the UK govt corrupted it with big money (before the US followed the British lead). Scientists tend to follow the money trail, like most everybody else. This is well-known to those who know the history of the AGW sell ie none of you lot. Thatcher and her cabinet were the central figures in the invention of the AGW myth (not only in the UK but in the world), and now it’s all those Leftists who hated her who have hijacked and hysterically froth at the mouth about AGW. Talk about irony, talk about an irony over everybody’s heads.

The left adopted AGW for its own reasons, not that they are conscious of these reasons, but PC has a lot to do with it, blaming the evil West and America in particular, the evil corporations run mainly by rich white men for fossil fuel emissions and supposed global warming, rather than face up to uncomfortable non-PC facts about the nature of environmental destruction the world over, overpopulation, corrupt Third World regimes and their role in ecological damage, deforestation of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the soil erosion, loss of species – plant and animal, dwindling fresh water supplies, the decimation of fish stocks in the world’s oceans etc. Something called the sixth extinction, but don’t worry about it, continue to scream hysterically in support of a political Thatcherite agenda misnamed science.