Bill,
Shame on you. All the time you spend berating other writers about making sure they get their facts straight when they're writing
fiction, and you, of all people, throw you own fact-checker out the window to put this in front of us. Did your bosses put you up to this? Now, I can't believe anything you've posted here. Document, or retract and apologize.
The plant is new enough that they would probably be using about 16 feet of high-density, laminated concrete consisting of discrete concrete layers (about 4" per pour) of alternating glass fiber composite cement and carbon fiber composite cement. It's rated at about 8000 C, for heat and a neutron flux density of about 1-E11 n/cm square. About the same flux density found inside the average star.
New enough? The
newest of the six in question started in
1979. Oh, and the walls of those Japanese containment vessels are five
feet thick, not five meters. And I doubt GE put anything fancy into the cement, especially as they were using low cost as a selling point. Composites do burn, by the way.
The steel is also a molybdenum/thorium poly alloy, which uses catalytic hardeners because a blast furnace doesn't burn hot enough to smelt it in its final form. It forms the base plate over the concrete. You never welded that stuff. Ever.
You're right, I haven't, because, as near as my research has taken me, it doesn't exist. And, by the way, if it can't be welded, how exactly do you fabricate anything out of it?
For starters, ALL steel comes from blast furnaces. Period. Hardening isn't done in blast furnaces, either; that's its own special process. I studied the steel-making process when I was ten years old.
Second, if anybody is putting thorium into a steel alloy, my research hasn't found it. And poly? Poly what? Also, I looked up "catalytic steel hardening" and found a patent for case-hardening of stainless steel parts (publication date 10/07/2008). I doubt that applies to these 30+ year-old vessels. From my own experience with stainless, I have a hard enough time imagining why it would need hardened anyway, but what I found said it was for resistance to wear and abrasion. Must be some really tough environment.
I have welded plenty of stainless steel -- a real bitch of a job. The joke among weldors is that, if you've got the arc hot enough to weld stainless, then you're running too hot. Look up 'austenite' and 'martensite' to understand this; basically, too much heat changes the property of the metal and it ain't stainless anymore, so you get rusting weld seams.
And, the first welding job I got was working for a company that had a radwaste contract, so I learned a little about the importance of all this. And, no, I wasn't trained on the job; I took an excellent comprehensive training program -- including theory -- at Lincoln Electric, prior to finding employment in the field. No, I didn't weld on the radwaste contract; they had nuclear-certified operators for that.
There's an old joke in the nuclear industry that Ted Kennedy has killed more Americans than nuclear power.
Tell that to the Russian naval personnel who died trying to save their submarine when its reactor core melted. Tell it to the people who worked containing the mess at Chernobyl.
Oh, and just as a side note -- I saw this on France News -- when the French were shopping for reactors, they refused to buy this model that GE was peddling (with a low-price appeal, no less) as being too dangerous.
Irony of ironies . . . it looks now as if the biggest threat is not from a core meltdown, but from the spent fuel sitting in insufficient water in an open pool
outside of its containment vessel.