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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?"
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.
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.
All nuclear plants are not created equal. The far far bigger problem is continuing to use early reactor designs past their end of life! It's like a 30 year old car that has not spent those years in a garage. It needs considerable work to stay usable, often to the point of requiring it to be rebuilt. Well the same thing holds true to nuclear plants, but we just don't spend that sort of money renovating the old ones. So they start to fail. How much effort is actually required to have severe problems is rather interesting, but I for on do not expect them to simply keep working.
We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
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
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
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.
We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.
Blaming anti-nuclear people for the lack of upgrades/maintenance of existing nuclear plants is wrong.
The real problem is that energy companies don't allocate enough money to that matter. As long as it works and produces energy, they keep maintenance to a minimum level to maximize profits.
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.
I don't think you can absolve the "invisible hand of the Free Market" from blame in this regard.
"Cost-cutting" has seemed to be an on-going theme in nuclear disasters.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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".
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