Mackenzie Singer Margaret Smith Coleman Stewart Brooke Sykes Jai Vaswani Matthew Hill

 Original purpose was to serve as a nuclear submarine power plant  Designed by Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory  Can be seen in aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and ice breakers

 Developed in the 1950s in a joint effort by General Electric and the Idaho National Laboratory, as an alternative to the pressurized water reactor  Several models of these reactors have added, or removed, various mechanisms  Keeps the water used in a closed circuit  Steam from reactor directly powers turbine, then is cooled and reused

 -BWR is designed to suppress pressure by means of venting -surrounding containment building protects each reactor so that in case a safety system does not work properly -Other safety systems are Reactor Protection System, Emergency Core- Cooling System, and Standby Liquid Control System

Although there were many problems that couldn’t be avoided, a big reason Fukushima experienced such a large meltdown was due to lack of safety regulations and continued maintenance. Despite numerous warnings that the plant could not withstand a tsunami with waves larger than 5.7 meters, the plant manager insisted that such a large tsunami was not a real threat. (The tsunami wave that it the plant was between 14 and 15 meters)

Local Range Power Detector Main Steam Isolation Valve Pressure Water Level

 The first nuclear power plant in the US was opened in 1957 in Shippingport, Pennsylvania  104 reactors in 65 nuclear plants in the US, 69 PWRs and 35 PWRs, across 31 states  Considerable power generation, but not the biggest source of power in the US (19.8% of US energy in 2008)  The future of nuclear power in the US is questionable, as the disaster in Japan, brought safety concerns to light  The countries with the most nuclear reactors are: USA, with 104 reactors; France, with 58 reactors; Japan, with 50 reactors; Russia, with 33 reactors; the Republic of Korea, with 21 reactors; and India, with 20 reactors