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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 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.
All this eco-stuff is especially pointless since there's a perfectly good solution to everything - put our heads in the sand, do nothing, pretend fossil fuels are harmless, and plan on increasing the population exponentially forever. It's Carter and Reagan all over again - fire the guy causing you pain my making you face up to problems, and bring in a new guy to tell you everything is wonderful as is... no more worries about Iran, the environment, the energy supply... right? Right?
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.
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.
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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.
"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 think Vietnam was the tipping point. A huge military expenditure forced the curtailment of domestic infrastructure subsidies. Which led to industrial stagnation, and those of us who were kids in the 70s remember it being a bit grim: strikes, inflation, gas price rises, quality problems, and so on.
Then came Reagan like the white knight, and his "solution" for Morning In America was to deregulate, which let private infrastructure companies morph into Enron-like shell games. Finance became the new "sunrise industry", alongside microcomputing and networking - the focus was on production of information rather than investment in the old crumbling infrastructure. It was easier and cheaper to make profits by repackaging ownership and debt than doing the hard work. Image, not substance, was what the free market rewarded, so that's what we got.
If you look at early 80s science fiction, like the cyberpunks, you see a lot of sunny optimism, even mixed in with terror, of how efficient private companies were going to be at building infrastructure. But that didn't happen except in computing, and I'm kind of surprised as to why even that occurred - I presume the Pentagon and Wall Street were the main drivers there.
Clinton slowed back a bit but kept mostly on the same privatisation track, and W accelerated it again. Now Obama's trying to reinvest in social infrastructure (healthcare) and gets called the worst of names for that. Far from Kennedy's space race era, half of the USA now sees the mere idea of national-level investment in anything but war as inherently evil. As an outsider, I don't understand why, but I can see the effects.
Space, for instance, was really all just about the ICBM buildout. Once the Minutemen were built, and the military got their spy and comms networks, and computers had shown that a manned space presence wasn't necessary to achieve the military objectives... there wasn't a whole lot left to do. Just more commsats.
Infrastructure is a hard problem to start with. When there's a political movement which actively believes even having a shared infrastructure to be a bad thing and that it's a moral duty to prevent those who don't have their own capital reserves from getting access to services... it gets a lot harder.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC