Attention can now be turned more directly toward consideration of safety. It has been pointed out that a considerable portion of the inherent safety of a reactor is associated with the fact that only well-known tech­nologies are involved in its design. However, there are other important as­pects to reactor safety, which are as follows:

Attitudes toward Safety. In the nuclear industry today there is a healthy attitude toward safety. This attitude is shared by the designers who build these reactors with safety a prime consideration and always well within existing regulations, by the governmental regulatory agencies es­tablishing design and operation criteria and conducting reviews of the safety designs, and by the utilities operating these plants.

Reactor Design Inherent Safety. The reactor design of today was se­lected in many aspects by taking advantage of those laws of nature which provide inherent safety features. For instance, proper reactor material se­lection is an important consideration. This serves the objective of limiting the possibility of a reactor accident.

Reactor Applied Safety. In addition to such natural advantages, the reactor designer includes applied safety features such as proper instru­mentation to limit the probability of a reactor accident.

Engineered Safeguards. The designer, as a further step, then assumes failure of such applied safety features and provides additional equipment systems to provide backup or emergency cooling and control even under accident conditions.

Containment, Another Engineered Safeguard. In spite of the inher­ent and additionally applied safety features making any failure extremely remote, a reactor designer nevertheless assumes that there still may be various serious failures of the reactor process system. Thus, nuclear power reactors are provided with containment barriers. Such barriers in addition to the engineered safeguards have the objective of limiting consequences of an accident in the extremely unlikely event that one ever occurs.

Design Features for Normal Operation. Although considerable effort is applied to preventing accidental release of fission products from a power reactor, a similar emphasis is applied to considerations of the release of radioactive material during normal operation. Every effort has been made to keep this release insignificant relative to natural background.

Each of the above important aspects of nuclear reactor safety will be described in detail so that it can be seen that nuclear power plants repre­sent a new high in public safety.