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."

Comments

Entergy safety culture

[mdsolar]

Entergy, the company that has been buying up old reactors to try to run them harder as they reach then end of their design lifetimes gets quite a few safety related criticisms. They use solo guards at security posts so it is not too surprising that one was found asleep at Indian Point last month: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/27/ap405783 6.html. They were recently reprimanded for for a worker taking a nap at the Pilgrim Reactor as well. The Simpsons is reality based television.

They also try to cut costs by refueling quickly. They boast of 90% up-times because of their quick refueling, but with reduced staff, how can they manage to both refuel and to scheduled maintenance, or avoid deferring maintenance that cannot fit within the shortened down time window? In the present case they seem to even be willing to run at reduced power rather than to promptly address the broken cooling tower. Was the ungreased bearing that caused their SCRAM on a list that just got skipped to get more up time? They give the impression that controlling costs it their primary function. Installing required warning sirens at both Indian Point http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20070830/NEWS01/708300442/1025/NEWS09 and Vermont Yankee http://www.reformer.com/headlines/ci_6835609 has been lagging. In Vermont they want Boy Scouts to distribute warning radios rather than doing it themselves.

Nuclear power does have a safety culture, using systems like lessons-learned to attempt to improve safety. But, pushing aging reactors past their design capacity or refueling faster with fewer people seem like lessons learned just waiting to happen. Shoestring methods lack the kind of redundancy that provides for safety margins.
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Re:Entergy safety culture

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear power does have a safety culture, using systems like lessons-learned to attempt to improve safety. But, pushing aging reactors past their design capacity or refueling faster with fewer people seem like lessons learned just waiting to happen. Shoestring methods lack the kind of redundancy that provides for safety margins.

I work in the nuclear industry. Decisions to uprate power reactors are not made willy-nilly. There is extensive engineering work done to provide technical justification to the NRC, who ultimately must approve it. The power rating for these plants was originally established with uncertainty margins reflective of when they were built: the 1960s and 1970s. As our engineering abilities have developed over the past 40 years, we've been able to trim some of that uncertainty. Larger uprates are sometimes contingent upon replacing old equipment.

The Simpsons are, in fact, not reality-based television. There are no rivers of green goo or three-eyed fish. Yes, these things are commercial operations, and there are schedule pressures. In every plant that I've ever been to, in every outage I've ever worked, the length of the outage has not been controlled by loading and unloading fuel. Lots of other stuff goes on. The reasons outage lengths have grown shorter have to do with better technology, improved scheduling and management, and a well-trained work force. Not with cutting corners on safety.

Re:Entergy safety culture

[ushering05401]

Vermont Yankee has been a sore subject in Vermont for a while, and not because of FUD. Doing things like losing spent fuel rods, and then trying to spin the situation as not-such-a-big-deal is not going to endear you to Vermonters or their neighbors.

Link: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/plant-specific-items/v ermont-yankee-issues/location-spent-fuel-rod.html

The rods are not in the cooling pool, they weren't found, and after observing this and other Yankee Nuke related issues as a concerned citizen I am convinced that Entergy and Co should get the fuck out of Vermont.

VT Yankee has been run too poorly for too long. Nuclear done right is a beautiful thing, nuclear done the VT Yankee way leads to disasters.

Regards from Burlington 05401.

Governor Douglas' reservation

[mdsolar]

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.
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Vermont and renewables

[mdsolar]

Vermont limits the amount of net metering in the state no more than 1% of peak capacity http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/incentive 2.cfm?Incentive_Code=VT02R&state=VT&CurrentPageID= 1&RE=1&EE=1, while at the same time participating in the Northeast regional climate agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps the issues arising at Vermont Yankee will prompt Vermont to follow New Jersey and remove the cap, or at least follow Maryland and California and raise it.
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Old reactors

[zeromorph]

I can't say how it is in the US but in Europe old reactors (that have been wriiten off) are very profitable - much more than newer ones. Since old reactors are more profitable but tend to be less secure, this is clearly a case were legislation has to intervene, it's just to dangerous.

Extern, independent reviews in such critical businesses cannot be wrong anyway.

Re:Old reactors

[Rei]

There's a simple reason for that, and it has nothing to do with a security/profitability tradeoff. The basic facts are:

A) Building nuclear power plants is *very* expensive.
B) Running nuclear powerplants is, proportionally to other types of power plants, very cheap.

Hence, any extension of the lifespan of a plant is a windfall, and any premature termination or even cost overruns in construction is an unmitigated disaster.

In the US, building new nuclear power plants, by the 1970s, had become so uneconomical due to those initial capital costs that nobody wanted to build them. And it wasn't simply due to the technology that the capital costs were high; there were a lot of poorly designed regulations that were causing problems. There have since been a lot of "common sense" changes to the regulations that will greatly aid in that. Examples:

  * Can now apply for a joint construction/operating license. That way, plants don't have to deal with the nightmare of having construction approved, sinking billions of dollars into it, but then not operation approved.

  * Can apply for specific generalized plant designs to be pre-approved, instead of having to have each plant be approved right before construction. Then, when building a plant, if you're using a pre-approved design, you don't have to go through an expensive and lengthy review.

  * Can apply to have a site pre-approved. I.e., you don't have to go through the whole process of seeking a construction/operation license for a site only to have the government say it's not approved.

And so on. I don't think even nuclear opponents would find these changes unreasonable (apart from the fact that it makes it easier for nuclear plants to be constructed). The hope is that with improved modern technology, and with the improved regulations, soon there won't be any need for nuclear subsidies. They use the term "nuclear renaissance". I think we'll know in a decade or so how it pans out, but I'm hopeful.

Lastly, related to the driving force for this new legislation (accidents): Accidents happen. Even in the best regulated, most ideal nuclear power plant, or any industrial process, there will be mistakes made. Even releases of radioactivity aren't as rare as a lot of people picture. The issue is: how relevant are these accidents in the overall scheme of things? Nuclear power plants have the capability to cause *huge* environmental damage. Accidentally releasing a couple liters of colling water is not "huge environmental damage". It's not even as bad as running a coal plant for a few days. The only types of things we have to really be concerned with are any kind of accident that would cause the significant erosion of dirty fuel rods and their release from the core with a breach in the containment structure -- a level of damage which it's not fair to downplay. However, such a situation is incredibly hard to happen in even an older-style western PWR. I hesitate to say "impossible" -- anything is impossible, and failure scenarios are hard to predict -- but just from the standpoint of the containment structure alone, getting through that would be incredibly difficult ("huge hydrogen explosion" and "sabotage" are the only way I can picture, and even then, it's no guarantee). Chernobyl, on the other hand, was only able to happen due to a combination of utter incompetence of leadership and, more importantly, a completely idiotic reactor design. Re, leadership: they tried to run it as close to meltdown as possible, knowing very well what a meltdown would entail, and knowing that it became hard to control when they did so. Re. design: they built a reactor with a majorly positive void coefficient, with *no* containment structure, *and* with the most idioticly designed control rods imaginable. We're talking tightly fitting (no room for thermal expansion), with *graphite tips*. Graphite was their freaking moderator! It boggles my mind how anyone ever thought this was a reasonable idea. The problem with uncontained meltdown isn't killing people (although people will die). It's the contamination of huge swaths of land that's the problem.

Anyways, just my 0.16 bits.

Re:Old reactors

[MrKaos]

A) Building nuclear power plants is *very* expensive.

Building a *safe* nuclear plant is expensive

B) Running nuclear powerplants is, proportionally to other types of power plants, very cheap.

The "economic" calculations do not factor the long term storage of Nuclear waste, the decommisioning of exising plants or the poorly researched medical consequences of long term exposure to the elements that Nuclear plants vent (Noble gasses that decay into deadlier elements) as standard operating proceedure. Additionally alot of greenhouse gasses (as yet unfactored costs) are produced from mining the ore to refining the fuel. Carbon dioxide output used to power the enrichment process, CFC 114 (20000 times more potent than c02 as a greenhouse gas) and Uranium hexafluoride. When these factors are properly costed, there is nothing cheap about the Nuclear fuel cycle, open or closed, essentially making it pointless.

In the US, building new nuclear power plants, by the 1970s, had become so uneconomical due to those initial capital costs that nobody wanted to build them. And it wasn't simply due to the technology that the capital costs were high; there were a lot of poorly designed regulations that were causing problems.

Reflecting the true cost of of a well engineered plant and the cost of doing business even when subsidised by government. If nuclear power is so good, why should it need massive subsidies, why won't insurance companies insure them and why is governement (aka:taxpayer) forced to underwrite them? Are the regulations you refer to safety regulations? You only regulate these plants to increase public safety with advise from engineers and scientists, and the regulation only happens in reaction to an incident. The AP-600 and AP-1000 Gen III reactors reduce capital costs by eliminating equipment subject to regulation, active safety devices and the amount of structural concrete and steel. So todays nuclear power plant have decreased margines of safety and less scope to do the types of modifications typical now-a-days to extend their lifespans.

The hope is that with improved modern technology, and with the improved regulations, soon there won't be any need for nuclear subsidies.

If we *must* have a reactor produce one that lasts 1000 years - better yet 2000, stop uranium mining and run it of existing waste. Centralise it where the current 70000 tons of plutonium waste will be stored (not Yucca) and use that as fuel. The bottom line is our material science is not enough today for us to build a nuclear powerplant that can be operated without releasing radition and radioactive elements that accumulate in the food chain and be cost effective without slowly killing us.

Furthermore we have a limited supply of Uranium, perhaps another 50 years give or take a decade, so the risk vs return makes it unviable to what, boil water. All this just to boil water, it's a dumb, high risk investment, worth trillions of dollars and the return is questionable at best. Sure, study reactor design, make better reactors for when we have the material's to but the only place we should use this stuff is in space outside of our gravity well.

Re:The sky is falling too.

[GPL Apostate]

I know what you anti-nuke people are gonna say, but Vermont is NOT 1980s Ukraine.

It sounds like they're working on it, though.

Refueling Efficiency

[tjstork]

I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to have a mountain of people to refuel a reactor quickly. A lot of companies do refueling simulations apriori and can set up a pretty good refueling script without the need for as many drones.

And, honestly, the need for safety at a nuclear power plant is so overstated that you can tend to drone it out and thus ignore those things that really do need to be safe. For example, when a company installed guard towers at its nuclear plants, the biggest dispute was that neither union or management could agree on the steps. It's just absurd, and to some extent, really, the union used the steps on the guard tower as a negotiating plank to get more money, more than any concern for safety or the obvious admonition - hang on to the rails.

Re:It's just capitalism at work.

[dattaway]

Capitalism is great, but if there's no review or auditing, they are going to give nuclear a very bad long term image. I'd rather live next to a nuke plant than a coal plant. They need to respect energy sources more than the almighty buck if nuclear is going to have a future.

Meltdowns are expensive and its likely our tax paid EPA Superfund will pick it up rather than their insurance. The greed needs to stop and they will run a clean shop.

I like solar, too, but eough of the spam

[ishmalius]

I know it's a slow Sunday, but please, enough of the sales pitch.

I for one am hoping that US nuclear operators will begin investing in newer technology, like the pebble-bed reactor. This one is an old idea, but recently implemented. It is inherently safer than rods & dampers, and is unable to go into meltdown. And the reactors can be smaller and can be located closer to the power-users for efficiency and economy.

Re:I like solar, too, but eough of the spam

[Grishnakh]

I'm not anti-nuke. I'm just anti-nukes-in-the-USA. We don't deserve them, precisely because of the bean counters you mention. We don't have a culture that values doing things the right way, instead of cutting corners and making things unsafe not just to save a nickel, but to save money and give the executives a huge bonus.

If we had a culture that valued doing things the right way, and doing it safely, instead of trying to make as much profit as possible even if it means paying off regulators to look the other way, then I'd support nukes in the USA. Nuclear plants work great in cultures like that; France is a prime example. Most of their power comes from nuclear plants, and they haven't had any problems. But that's because they're more interested in doing things right than in giving executives big bonuses. So for France, nuclear power is the right choice. Not for America.

Having nuclear power in America is like having nuclear power in Mexico. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

Re:It's just capitalism at work.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:pebble bed isn't ideal either...

[YU Nicks NE Way]

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.

Oh great

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Frustration

[kidcharles]

I don't know who I am more frustrated with, the plant operators who allow safety/security to lapse, or the overreactors (no pun intended) who are knee-jerk anti-nuke and use every small thing to bash nuclear power. People need to wake up; we are facing massive climate change and in the short term (decades) there are two sources of energy that can serve as an energy backbone to meet global need: coal or nuclear. The only question is, do you want your pollution in the form of carbon, causing massive global warming leading to human and economic destruction in the form of wars over water and category 5 hurricanes, or do you want your pollution in barrels stored underground? How is this even a question at this point?

IAEA

[BlueParrot]

Ok, now call me naive here, but why not just do what everyone else does when they have trouble like this and ask the IAEA to inspect their power plants? This is what Sweden did after the incident at Forsmark, it's what Japan did after the leaks associated with the recent earthquake, and I believe quite a few other countries have done so as well. As an extra bonus, getting the thumb down from IAEA would be rather embarrassing for the NRC, so chances are it would make them actually do their job... Really, the US pays for a huge portion of the UN's budget, so why not actually use its services...

Re:It's just capitalism at work.

[Goaway]

If there are market pressures that favor self-regulation, But there aren't. And no, letting consumers choose their power company isn't going to change that, as they will just go with the cheapest, thus introducing even more market pressure to NOT self-regulate!

Re:It's just capitalism at work.

[Goaway]

And have American cars taken over the entire US market? What about eco-friendly companies?

"Safe nuclear power" is not worth much if it's a fucking niche market.

Re:It's just capitalism at work.

[falconwolf]

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.

That is why I support both some regulations and a strong court system. With good courts those living near these plants would be able to sue the owners and operators of the plants, and win thereby receiving compensation. However because of laws like the Price-Anderson Act they can't be. The federal government has subsidized the nuclear power industry by shielding them lawsuits. With regulations there is no true capitalism, but are needed. However laws like this are bad.

Falcon

FUD

[falconwolf]

We need more people who know what they're talking about to cut through the damaging anti-nuclear FUD

And what of the pro nuclear FUD? Whatever happened to "Too cheap to meter"?

Falcon

Re:US power industry safety culture

[mdsolar]

I think this is an interesting point. Up until recently, problems at US plants had to be disclosed to the public and so there was a flow of information that could be broadly helpful. In Japan there have been coverups of problems that have lasted years and at the UKs Sellafield plant outside monitoring by non-governmental groups were needed to document the existance of problems. In the US, the culture is changing. For Official Use Only desiganations are being used to hide serious hazards and the DOE project at Yucca Mountian has experienced data falsification. In the linked article we see the NRC taking the position that the legislation would be duplicative with the plant operator cheering them on. Since when does a federal agency tell congress they can't pass legislation? They sound mighty defensive. I think that you are right that the US industry experiences too many problems and day-late-dollar-short maintenance can be seen as part of the reason. But, I'm not sure that what is going on elsewhere is better or if we just don't hear about the problems. As the US moves to greater secrecy, things may get worse everywhere.