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NRC Relicensing Old "Zombie" Nuclear Plants
mdsolar writes "In the Dec. 7 edition of The Nation, Christian Parenti details what he considers to be the real problem with nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions in the US: Not the high cost of new nuclear power, but rather the irresponsible relicensing of existing nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The claim is that the relicensed plants — amounting to more than half ot the 104 original 1970s-era nukes in the US — operate like zombies beyond their design lifetimes only because of lax regulation spurred by concern over carbon dioxide emissions. But these plants are actually failing, as demonstrated by a rash of accidents. And some of the ancient plants are now being allowed to operate at 120% of their designed capacity. There is a video interview with Parenti up at Democracy Now."
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No. See, there's something important you need to understand about engineering, which apparently the submitter doesn't understand either:
The plants were designed back in the days of tables and slide rules. They were designed with large safety margins, because the understanding of the science and the engineering was imperfect. Today our understanding is much greater, and we have very advanced computer models to help the design process. Ever wondered why modern bridges and buildings are much more 'delicate' than older behemoths? Because we can compute the actual behavior of the structures to much higher precision and accuracy, so the needed safety margin is less. It's the same with nuclear plants.
The plants were built to a certain design that had large safety margins... not because they were needed per se, but because the designers couldn't prove they weren't. Today, we can model all the behavior of the plants to a high degree, so we don't need the same safety margins to keep these plants safe. You don't need a cooling system with 50% excess design capacity, since we can prove that 25% is sufficient. We know now that the containment wall is twice as big as it needs to be, for the original design load. So, we can use the safety margins to run the plants longer and to higher capacity than the original design.
In the engineering world, this is done all the time. The only 'news' here is that it's being done with nuclear power plants. But still, that's no big deal. This is just the new anti-nuclear luddite rallying cry.