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New Legislation Proposed For Nuclear Safety
mdsolar writes "Recent problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant have spurred Congresspeople from Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to introduce legislation that would allow State governors to request independent safety reviews of nuclear power plants. The reviews would exclude NRC employees who usually work on that plant and include non-NRC reviewers. This review model is based on one that found problems at Maine Yankee before it closed. Problems at Vermont Yankee have included a cooling tower collapse, a SCRAM caused by an un-greased valve, and failure of a safety system during the SCRAM. The plant is coming off of heightened review after shipping nuclear material with insufficient shielding. The plant's application for a 20 year license extension is also currently under review."
Vermont Governor Douglas expresses reservations about the idea that governors of neighboring states could call for a safety review. He feels there may be jurisdictional issues. In the context of nuclear safety, border crossing effect would seem to make this provision pretty sensible. It should be remembered that New England has pushed for scrubbers for mid-western coal plants because of cross-border effects on water quality.s -selling-solar.html
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Capitalism is great, but if there's no review or auditing, they are going to give nuclear a very bad long term image.
And any review or auditing WILL be the result of governmental regulation. It's naive to think that any company will regulate itself when it can save money by not doing so. Since capitalism is about spending as little as possible to get the greatest output, these two ideas go against the very grain of each other. Capitalism is a wonderful thing, but like everything in the world, it cannot stand entirely on its own.
Your source lists a set of theoretical problems, none of which has been realized in almost three decades of testing. The one "example" of an issue is a stuck pebble being incorrectly handled during the very early experimentation with pebble bed reactors -- which led to a redesign of the reactor to fix the problem.
Renewables are not going to provide enough energy, ever. Yes, they should be used -- but there is no way we will ever be able to extract the exawatt we need for modern society from renewable sources. We have no choice but to make nuclear power work, and the longer we pretend otherwise, the more trouble we're going to be in, both economically and ecologically.
There are probable 500 people in the entire country who are qualified to rate nuclear reactors and they are all employed working for the big energy companies or the NRC. Now the States want to get involved. I can guarantee that they are not going to rewrite their civil service wage scales just to accommodate nuclear regulators. Instead of ponying up the $250K+/yr needed for each qualified engineer they will instead hire inexperienced engineers from a "related field" for $80K/yr and the situation will look like it does for their state nuclear transportation officials: it will be a clusterfuck.
But this is probably what they want. Instead of regulating the older plants they will hire a bunch of inexperienced engineers to throw a wrench in the works and slow down the commissioning of newer safer reactors. Brilliant!