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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."
The Chernobyl disaster happened because of a test that was being run outside of safe parameters plus some other coincidences. The plant was not being shut down permanently, it was being taken down for maintenance, nor was it anywhere near its designed life time at 3 years of operation for reactor 4.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Once again, the crowd that wants us to cut back our carbon emissions comes up with things we can't do rather than some suggestions. And their alternatives aren't viable for 10 years or more when they finally get all the kinks worked out, or electricity becomes so expensive they become economical.
.. mdsolar ... go back and stick your head in the sand until you have grow some more FUD.
We can't build new nuclear because of the NIMBY crowd. We can't build new coal fired because of the eco-nuts. We can't drill for more oil because of the morons in congress. We don't have to wait for Obama to ruin this country, these groups are doing it for us.
Hey
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The design capacity is irrelevant if subsequent advances in technology have increased that capacity.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Chernobyl happened because engineers bypassed safety devices and did stupid things in a plant without a containment vessel. I've not read that the overrating had anything to do with the disaster. Pure, unadulterated human stupidity did.
Back to the TFA. Color me unimpressed. Using terms such as 'zombie', "decrepit" and 'unprecidented' without a shred of evidence makes me think that the article and the author have a bit too much bias to really believe. Sure, it could be true, but we run things past their design lives all of the time. With careful maintenance and modification it works well. Perhaps maintenance isn't being done correctly as the article suggests, but lets see a bit more evidence, shall we?
Even though the operators of nuclear plants are shielded from much of the liability of a reactor failure by the feds, no operator wants to Wilson a plant - it's just too expensive.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Greenes did huge damage to this country by instilling fear in nuclear power. While Greens mostly support good things to protect environment their opposition and fearmongering of nuclear plants caused us to build economy on oil.
Besides that we canceled all large-scale development of next generation reactors (breeders, lead-cooled, etc.) capable of burning 99% of fuel and leaving almost no waste.
On the bigger picture in the last twenty-thirty years people became more comfortable and lazy and unwilling to take any risks. This affected everything in the society - cancellation of Space Shuttle program, public safety even kids wearing helmets on the bicycles. If there is no risk there is no reward but it seems we kind of forgot about it.
The EPA won't let new nuclear plants to get built. If the plants get decommissioned it will literally cut our energy production by 1/2. It takes 10-15 years to build a new nuclear plant by EPA guidlines, and the population in that zone won't let it get built just as they refuse to let wind turbines to get built.
So our only short term solution is to let the NRC extend the lives of the plants. It is either that or force new nuclear plants to get built but it isn't cost efficient to do so.
there is a real energy crisis looming. Simply because people won't plan ahead, the oil will start to run out roughly when all the fission plants have to go offline do to safety reasons.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Pripyat happened because one of its reactors was running at a higher capacity than allowed and after its designed life cycle
No.
The Chernobyl reactor disaster happened because the operators decided to run a test, and turned off the automatic safety shut-down.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
According to him, if you're still running your car after the warantee expires, you've got a "zombie car"-- regardless of how much maintanance you put into it. He says a lot of scary things, but doesn't really have much real information.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Reprocessing fuel reduces the waste stream. And you can bury the waste (after you vitrify it) that you can't reprocess, say in Yucca Mountain.
Wrong, it was an existing reactor (it was built in 1983 and the disaster took place in 1986) and they were testing the shutdown procedures. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Panic now, beat the rush!
This will not end well
Not necessarily. While still in the research phase, Fourth Generation reactors look very promising, waste that remains dangerous for decades rather than thousands of years and the ability to use waste from Gen III reactors as fuel.
Even current breeder reactors can use some waste as fuel.
I am a nuclear engineering/physics graduate student. Whether that makes me uniquely qualified to comment or just another industry shill is, I suppose, a question of which color Kool-Aid you drank with your Post Toasties this morning. That disclaimer out of the way:
This article is garbage. Others have noted the inflammatory language ("Zombie nukes?" really?). The author is misleading his readers on the issue of radiation-induced embrittlement and stress-corrosion cracking -- whether through ignorance or deliberately deceptive language, it's hard to say. You'll note that of the "shocking" lapses in power plant operations, ZERO led to significant releases of radioactivity. ZERO led to any worker deaths or major injuries. The worst of the bunch, the "six inch deep hole" in the Davis-Besse pressure vessel head, wasn't caused by lax regulation -- it was caused by deliberate fraud. Inspection records were faked, and the people responsible are currently serving time in federal prison. That does point out a legitimate concern: if the operator is willing to lie to the NRC, then bad things can happen. NRC could probably use a shot in the arm, but to suggest it's merely a lapdog of the industry is highly inflammatory, and evidence suggests, not especially accurate.
These reactors were licensed to operate for forty years because that is the maximum time permitted by law. Why was forty years written into the law? Because there was significant uncertainty as to how reactors would hold up in the long haul. The law was written conservatively. Designers built large safety margins into their designs to ensure compliance. Forty years of operational experience has demonstrated to everyone but the most anti-nuke environmentalists that there is sufficient safety margin to operate safely for another twenty years.
As for the 120% operating capacity... sheesh. These plants have had steam generator upgrades. More efficient heat removal allows the turbines to produce more electricity. The nuclear side of the plant is essentially unchanged. They probably drive the primary coolant pumps a little harder, but still well within their designed capacity. So yes, we're getting 20% more energy out of the same number of fissions. No, we're not jamming 20% more fuel into the core. Again: deliberately misleading, or poorly informed? Hard to say.
The cause of the Chernobyl disaster, however, was the poor design of Russian nuclear power plants.
Yeah, cooling your reactor by pumping oxygen-laden air through a red-hot carbon lattice is a really good idea. Excuse me, I need to go slap someone.
France generates pretty much all of its electricity from nuclear, with reprocessing, using pressurised water reactors. Not only do they have a number of handy engineering benefits such as isolating the water loop through the reactor from the water loop through the turbines, but they also have a particularly useful safety feature in that they're self-regulating --- temperature goes up, power output goes down. France has an excellent safety record; I can find only one major incident, which was a coolant spill in 2008.
They even do their own waste reprocessing into plutonium, which is then reused to generate more power. Unaccountably, terrorists don't seem to have stolen any of it.
The article mentions the mishap-plagued Vermont Yankee, currently near relicensing and with a 120% uprate a couple of years ago. Entergy, the current owner, plans to spin off ownership of half its plants, including Yankee, to a new firm financed by massive debt. This way Entergy will no longer itself be financially responsible for any aspect of these plants, while pocketing most of the projected profits from their next two decades of licensed operation in advance.
So Entergy's got little reason to concern itself with whether Yankee will work as advertised after relicensing. Relicensing is merely a requirement to spin it off, and relinquish Entergy of any responsibility at all, beyond immediate, massive profit.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comparing Chernobyl to any American commercial reactor and talking about what could happen, without mentioning the severe differences, is just like mentioning a prior dam failure, hinting at the imminent collapse of Boulder dam, and not mentioning the little detail that the prior dam was made of packed dirt and not concrete.
Whoops, it's Slashdot, better go with a car analogy:
It's like planting explosives under one make of car, claiming that model blows up more than another brand, and not mentioning the explosives part.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
I think it is odd in this, our age of progress and technological prowess that we can no longer afford the infrastructure of the past.
New nuke plants are now somehow out of reach, as are new oil refining facilities, rail, bridges, sewers. Somehow in the last 30 years we lost the ability to undertake large infrastructure, which you would think given the wealth, technology, etc... that it would be easier.
I wonder if this is political or simply part of a new phase. It just seems to me that everything was constructed in the 60's and 70's and now everything is crumbling and falling apart around us, and we lack the ability or will replace it.
Actually, no. The disaster happened because a test was carried out less experienced night operators who did every don't in the manual trying to follow a test procedure they did not understand. The last straw was removing more control rods completely from the core than was permitted for any reason in an attempt to brute force their way past xenon poisoning rather than scrubbing the test and allowing the iodine and xenon to decay before attempting to increase output as the manual required. At that point the reactor was in an extremely unstable condition.
They then made matters worse by reducing the coolant flow to the point that voids formed in the core (the reduced flow was part of the test procedure). In that particular reactor design, voids increase the reaction rate. That taken together DID "burn off" the xenon and suddenly the reacter was way over it's design limits. Compounding the problem, the tips of the control rods were inert but displace water (effectively a void), so when they tried to scram the reactor it exploded instead.
During all of this, several safety systems that would have scramed the reactor in time were manually disabled.
Put another way, they started with an intrinsically dangerous reactor design (not permitted in the U.S.), overrode a number of safety systems, mis-handled the power level, then attempted to recover by performing an absolutely prohibited operation. Finally now that the reactor was in an incredibly precarious state they further provoked disaster by performing an experimental test procedure (whose carefully planned pre-conditions were not in any way met).
Notably, the reactor went prompt critical rather than supercritical as a nuclear weapon would. The explosive yield was about a ton of TNT (compared to 10 kilotons for a small weapon).
So, unsurprisingly it shows that it's a bad idea to have insufficiently trained operators overide safety mechanisms and then ignore every rule in the book in order to carry out an experiment on a dangerously designed nuclear reactor. Particularly in a bureaucratic culture where supervisors would be more upset by a scheduled test being scrubbed than they would be at safety procedures being ignored. A deliberate plan to cause a disaster couldn't have come up with a better procedure.
I love the crux of their argument being that the plants are operating at 120% of their initial design... Unfortunately, the author has no clue as to why that output figure was increased. The actual generators (i.e. the turbines, wires, etc., that are turned by the steam which produce the electricity) have been updated using today's technology. Generator technology has increased dramatically over the last 40 years from when the original plants were produced. In fact, generators have been updated in the plants during most refueling cycles in their normal operation. As those generators increased in efficiency, so too has the output power gone up at the plants. That increased efficiency has allowed the same power from the nuclear reactor to create more output power.
Tritium laced water is bad in the water supply, I agree. But as the author said, these happened at one location which the original owner thought was going to be decommissioned. It should have been made know to the new purchasers that some maintenance was not done. I mean, really, would you put a new exhaust system on a 15 year old car which has over 250,000 miles on it? No, you would patch up the one you got and get ready to buy a new car, which is what the previous owner did. They did neglect to tell the new owner of the "car" about the issue and that there was only a temporary patch in place...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
More specifically, modern safe reactors have a negative void coefficient. As water vaporizes in an critically hot reactor, it reduces the rate of reaction. The hotter the reactor gets, the larger the void(s) in the coolant, the less reaction occurs.
Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient.
There was a perfect storm of design flaw and poor decision making that lead to the Chernobyl disaster.
The experiment the reactor was running was designed to test whether the pumps could circulate current through the reactor after a power loss on inertia alone (without using the backup diesel generators.)
It was surprising to find out that the direct death toll (discounting the increased cancer rates following the release of radiation) was 56 people, including the responders to the event, and workers on-site when the accident occurred.
Although the nearby town of Pripyat was abandoned after the disaster, Reactors 1-3 continued operation. Reactor number 2 was damage in a fire, and shut down in 1991. Reactor 1 was decommissioned in 1996, and reactor number 3 was shutdown in 2000.
Personally, reading heavily into the Chernobyl accident has gone a long way towards improving my opinion on nuclear power. To see what it took to cause the most recognizable and most cited disaster, really puts things into perspective.
I work as a plant operator at a boiling water reactor. The re-licensing of plants for an extra 20 years is based on the life span of the pressure vessel. The author is correct about neutron embrittlement. It does cause materials to fail by causing interstitial point defects in the grain structure. However, the point defects reach an equilibrium over the life of the plant. As more defects are created by collisions with neutrons, others are filled again by a collision. This has been observed through mechanical testing of test materials that are placed in high neutron flux zones in the core. These are removed and mechanically tested every 2 years. Calling these old plants 'zombies' is indicative of a serious lack of knowledge about materials, engineering and nuclear power in general. As to the horrific sounding 120% power levels that plants are running, you can thank digital technology for this extra power generation. When the plants were designed in the 60s, analog controls required tremendous safety margins to ensure save operation. Coolant flows and many other variables had a large margin of uncertainty when being measured and computed to show reactor power. With modern computers, we can get extremely precise readings on coolant flows, neutron flux, etc, which allows us to increase the power of the reactor without reducing the margin of safety we operate under.