Safety
In most reactor designs, as a safety measure, control rods are attached to the lifting machinery by electromagnets, rather than direct mechanical linkage. This means that automatically in the event of power failure, or if manually invoked due to failure of the lifting machinery, the control rods will fall, under gravity, fully into the pile to stop the reaction. A notable exception to this fail-safe mode of operation is the BWR which requires the hydraulical insertion of control rods in the event of an emergency shut-down, using water from a special tank that is under high nitrogen pressure. Quickly shutting down a reactor in this way is called scramming the reactor.
Read more about this topic: Control Rod
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. He becomes a perjurer, all his thoughts and emotions being directed with reference, not to an accurate and just appraisal of the real world but rather to the safety and exaltation of his loved one, and the madness with which he pursues her, transmogrifying his attention, blinds him like a victim.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“He had a gentleman-like frankness in his behaviour, and as a great point of honour as a minister can have, especially a minister at the head of the treasury, where numberless sturdy and insatiable beggars of condition apply, who cannot all be gratified, nor all with safety be refused.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)