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Alabama Nuclear Reactor Gets 'F' Grade
GatorSnake writes "The US federal government issued a rare red finding against an Alabama nuclear power plant after an emergency cooling system failure. 'In an emergency, the failure of the valve could have meant that one of the plant's emergency cooling systems would not have worked as designed (PDF).' Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?"
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that adds another zero to the zero deaths from nuclear this year. thats zero up from last year. gonna need some big design changes to catch up with fossil fuels.
This is why we really need to spread out our research on fusion ; it's far more intrinsically safe.
Fission reactors are based on the premise of controlling something that runs away from you if you let it. So if you stop trying (cut costs, etc), something disastrous happens.
If you stop trying hard enough to make fusion work, it just stops working.
In IT, we have "Small, Fast, Cheap. Choose two."
In reactor design, we seem to have "Efficient, Cost Effective, Safe. Choose two."
I don't like it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Modern nuclear age? What?
The Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant began construction in 1966 (Fukushima Dai-ichi dates from 1971). Furthermore, both use General Electric boiling water reactors. The major difference seems to be that Browns Ferry is/was expected to continue to operate until 2033.
Similarly designed technology dating from a similar time has similar flaws. In most areas engineers learn from their mistakes and upgrade regularly for precisely this reason. Then we actually would be in the 'modern nuclear age', and discovering a new flaw would be disturbing news as opposed to being a wholly predictable consequence of expecting to keep dodgy, ancient crap running for well over half a century.
Let's apply free market mechanisms to nuclear power stations. Yup - awesome idea!
Global Fissile Crisis here we come...
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
There are no modern nuclear reactors running commercially in the United States.
And that's the problem - the United States is not part of any "modern nuclear age.". We're stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, design-wise - retrofits really don't substitute.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.
No, what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling, but there's fundamentally no defense against having about the mass of the Great Lakes flung into your face at ~150km/h.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Much like for a teacher who only gives out A's being a phoney, having a review hand out a failing grade give me more confidence in the system. It shows that the USG is not glossing over problems.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Actually the way capitalism works is before building a power plant (or anything else for that matter) it first helps get the people it wants elected elected... then it lobbies for and gets subsidies and loan guarantees... and THEN it builds the unsafe whatever that it couldn't itself afford the risk of building.
This space available.
No, it merely underscores that we do not *have* a "modern" nuclear age.
People, please remember that the vast majority of nuclear reactors in use were built in the 50's and 60's. They were built based on early reactor designs. Reactor designs have improved considerably in the last 20 years but because the public basically has a "no nukes" position, very few new design reactors have actually been built. We are still basically running old reactor designs, many of which are long past their design lifetimes. Until we replace them with modern, safer reactor designs or forms of renewable energy, there will be a danger of another Fukushima/Chernobyl type of catastrophe.
Lowest bidder and profit: Capitalists win, Everyone else lose. Dangerous things should not let in the hands of capitalists.
There should be a law saying that if someone put some money in an industry with the objective of making a profit, he should live with his family next to the most dangerous installation he put money in.
That must be why the worst nuclear disaster ever took place at a power station built, owned and operated by the famously capitalist Soviet Union, right? Right?
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Aye, I am all for it. Especially remove the arbitrary regulations regarding liability and let the power companies fully insure their reactors themselves. Wait, what? No insurance company would be willing to do that? Score one for the free market!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The precise degree of regulatory capture at any given time is going to be a politically determined matter; but you really can't expect any other stance: Nuclear plants are very expensive to build, and very expensive to decommission; but the cost of fuel is low, and the cost of temporary-turning-into-permanent-on-an-installment-plan 'disposal' of fuel is also fairly low. Thus, unless the maintenance situation is so bad that you have a crack squad of Godzilla slayers on staff, the economics are basically never in favor of replacement if you can keep the sucker running. Even if you can't, decommissioning costs are likely t dwarf the costs of putting it on some sort of "standby" and leaving it until you can retire away from the problem.
It's very much unlike, say, gas units, which are pretty cheap to put up and tear down; but burn fairly expensive fuel(and, worst case, just sort of explode a little bit, spreading not-very-scary natural gas combustion products), where the economic incentives to take down old plants and put up more efficient ones work out comparatively well.
The NRC, on the other hand, is pretty much in the business of delivering bad news in order to head off low-probability, but very bad, potential accidents. People that unpopular need institutional cultures of iron to avoid subversion.
It seems every time there's a problem with a nuclear power plant, some people trot out the excuse "Oh, it was an old design", like that's supposed to make things better.
The fact remains, we keep nuclear power plants running for decades. Just like all power plants of that generating capacity, nuclear plants are hugely expensive to build, so you need to keep them running for decades to make them cost effective. If we're going to declare nuclear power designs obsolete and unsafe so soon after they are built, then there is no way they will ever be cost justified.
You can't handwave the problem away by saying "they're old".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You're wrong there - had the backup generators been at the top of the hill or possibly merely installed with snorkels, it would have been fine.
Had the reactors been ABWRs with a backup gas turbine inside the big concrete turbine building in addition to the diesel generators, it probably would have been fine. None of the buildings seem to have sustained any significant damage from the tsunami.
Had the reactors been ESBWRs (close to but not yet approved by the NRC), it would have been fine. ESBWRs don't need backup generators for decay heat removal. They don't need ANYTHING for the first 72 hours after a SCRAM, and the only thing they need beyond that is a fire truck to refill the ICCS pools. Probably once they're refilled you have longer since decay heat generation is constantly reducing.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?