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Officials Agree On Global Nuclear Stress Tests
Hugh Pickens writes "Government ministers and officials from the European Union countries who met to discuss atomic energy safety have agreed to carry out stress tests on nuclear reactors to test their capacity to withstand major incidents like the earthquake and tsunami that rocked the Fukushima plant in March. 'The accident at Fukushima in Japan has affected us all,' says French Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. 'It quickly became apparent there is a need to learn lessons from the accident and to improve and raise our standards and ways of cooperating on nuclear safety.' The stress tests will be performed on Europe's 143 working reactors and other atomic installations. 'You have to move the safety envelope,' says Roger Mattson, former leader of the US task force that investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, and an organizer of the group issuing the letter. 'You have to take these severe accidents into account and do more to prevent the very low-probability events.'"
I know this isn`t _exactly_ the same (or really even close), but isn`t it this kind of thinking that caused the disaster at Chernobyl?
Global Thermonuclear Stress Test sounds like potentially a lot of fun. A very strange game though, the only winning move is to play very very carefully.
I am officially gone from
In the UK we don't really do earthquakes and tsunamis so I suppose our stress-tests will feature vibrations caused by loud music from the neighbours (because we certainly won't ask them to turn it down, v unBritish) and predictable rain on the first day of a test-match.
I know the truth and I know what you're thinking
This reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks his dad how they determine the maximum load of a bridge. His dad responds by saying something like: "They keep driving heavier and heavier trucks across it until it collapses then rebuild it"...
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0607/Fukushima-meltdown-could-be-template-for-nuclear-terrorism-study-says
Do we need a single security provider for anti-terrorist protection the way we protect the oil supply chain? If the EU can't work together, perhaps they should cede sovereignty on this in the same manner that Pakistani nuclear weapons are 'secured.'
Again, the reaction to this is "no bad events, no matter how low probability, no matter the cost!"
What is the actual acceptable cost/benefit tradeoff? How low a probability event do we ignore, even if the consequences are large? I can't answer these questions, but it's not obvious that this is even in the minds of the people proposing "do whatever it takes" activities. (This is in response to the "we have to do more to address these low-probability events" sentiment.)
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Downplay the negatives, emphasize the positives is what gets you promotions and makes new deals.
And if the worst happens, put out you hand for public money, pretending like, gee, nobody saw that coming. Worked for Banks, GFC, BP - the list goes on.
If you had to have safety equipment on hand, and had to save for decommissioning, these plants or
in BP's case, Deep-water - these projects would never start.
So you make up a risk plan, put in it what sounds reasonable, and make sure there is no decent peer review,
and make sure updates never happen. It pays to hide these, because the better the fiction, the more advantage you have over your competitors.
Nuclear safety is amazingly safe as-is, what is needed is replacing older plants with new designs that are inherently more safe and provide that safety more cost effectively.
The reactionary approach due to Fukushima is precisely the wrong way to look at things, the takeaway lesson should be that even with the worst possible scenario nuclear is vastly safer than coal, gas and hydro and possibly safer than solar. It's the small frequent events vs large singular event problem that plagues the car vs airplane safety disparity all over again.
We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better or at least try to be more fact based in global infrastructure matters.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
From what I can tell, the Japanese plant (and apparently most around the world) are designed in a way that they will have a 100% chance of a meltdown in about 24 hours if they lose mains power and their generator fails to operate (assuming no outside intervention). Most datacenters have at least that, and some more. How about they build nuclear plants to at least the standard of a common datacenter?
And if they wanted to get fancy, they could always put a small generator on site that runs on waste heat in the cooling system capable of generating local power in emergencies. That way something like fuel contamination wouldn't cause a meltdown. But most (all?) nuclear plants have no ability to use local power to run the plant and have to take power from the grid. And if the grid is down and the single generator doesn't work, then there will be a meltdown.
Learn to love Alaska
The plant was designed to handle tsunamis, just one 1/3rd the size of the one that hit, no other tsunamis anywhere near that had hit that area etc.
So say they triple the height of the tsunamis it can handle, and then a meteor strikes in the ocean and one 5x the size comes along... still screwed.
It's called diminishing returns, you can't make something safe for all situations (I mean hell try and make something safe for when the sun explodes in billions of years)
Once in an unknown period of time freak of nature natural disasters can and will happen, and designing for these as regular operating procedure will simply retard everyone getting on to cleaner nuclear power.
He the Safety Inspector at SNPP
I hear that facility is in need of review.
More bureacratic bullshit from the top. Appease the electorates, and no doubt there was some pushing by those angry corporate types in Germany that are about to lose a lot of money. The Ukraine isn't part of the EU yet, or even a candidate.. but it's vitally important to current EU member states that something is done.
Our lesson (hah, yet again) is that the real work is never done. It's a certainty that future issues of radioactive release at Chernobyl are as serious as the original event - we're not talking about some small leaks into already-radioactive surroundings, but the building collapsing and sending debris off to distant cities and farms.
Actually, this -would- be doable without huge risk, but at some serious cost and without all the normal profit.
The gist would be to replace fuel rods with "simulator rods" that use non-radioactive, chemical energy source. You -can- produce this much energy by plain old chemistry, although over much shorter period of time (and without net energy profit, making the rods will cost much more than electricity they will produce). Some specifics of reactor, like influence of moderator on speed of reaction would be missed (say, xenon poisoning problem), but failure of any essential system would not result in radioactive leak.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0607/Fukushima-meltdown-could-be-template-for-nuclear-terrorism-study-says
Why don't we just test them a few at a time? Seems like that might be a little safer.
Unless the average citizen of Western states wants to either drastically reduce their power consumption or accept foreign energy hegemony over their economies, nuclear power is essential at least in the interim. We need to take this as an opportunity to spend money to build better reactors, costs be damned up front, and better facilities for handling waste. The alternatives are simply not acceptable to most people and this isn't something we have the luxury of "having it all on." We need to pick our poison. For my money, I'd rather see the Western governments take some of their budgets and put them directly into fixing this up than seeing a drop in living standards or Russian/Middle Eastern domination of our energy supplies.
Some simple advice from Warren Buffett and Freakonomics would do. We need to align owner's/management's goals and motivations to that of the public's by making people responsible for their actions for critical and large utilities or companies that are "too big to fail". If they bankrupt a company, they need to become financially destitute as well, with no insurance protection. They should be culpable for any messes after they leave for up to 1 year. If they commit fraud on an Enron/Madoff level, life sentences or death would be appropriate.
In this case, people owning and running nuclear plants would basically bet their fortunes and lives that they are running the facilities with integrity and great care. Any damage to the environment would be their responsibility and for all those who were affected (lost business, land, health issues, etc).
Eliminate any conflict of interest. For instance, did they delay the cooling down of the nuclear reactors with corrosive seawater to save themselves some money? Why did the backups fail? Was it simply because they were lazy and never tested their backups? (would have revealed problems with incompatible electrical plugs.) Did they not want to spend extra money for diesel generators that were properly protected from water like the other surrounding plants that did not fail? Inspections of safety procedures and backup tests should be public knowledge and transparent like they do for NYC restaurant inspections. Anything less than an A is unacceptable.
The same should go for the agencies that are supposed to regulate and protect the public. Nuclear plant owners should not be cozy with those that are supposed to watch and regulate them. Eliminate all conflicts of interest by having members with zero ties to the nuclear industry, with severe financial and criminal penalties for gifts/bribes/consulting jobs, etc. Peoples lives are at stake, and those that violate this trust should be dealt with severely.
And this practice needs to be coordinated and overseen on a global level, as meltdowns can affect people much farther than the immediate area unfortunately. Until we have something basic like this in place, there will be more preventable disasters to come.
As Terry Pratchett said, One-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.
I've posted this before, but never early enough to get much response. I'll post it again to see if anyone has anything reasonable to dispute my concern.
I've always been a big nuclear supporter of safe nuclear power, and, by safe, I mean ones where the core can reliably melt down to puddle with very minimal impact on the environment around. The thing that bothers me is that I used to believe our current nuclear plants could do this. I am no longer convinced. Indeed, I am openly concerned this is not the case.
In the four cases of partial core meltdowns we have now seen (the Three Mile Island reactor and the three Fukushima reactors), the zicronium fuel rod casings have shown themselves to be a major liability. In all cases, they reacted with the hot steam to produce hydrogen gas, which has then posed a non-insignificant threat to the containment structure. In the case of the Fukushima reactors, we saw this actually happened to unit 3, and on day 3 of Three Mile Island incident, there was significant concern that an accumulated hydrogen bubble would explode damaging the containment structure.
I realize that one in four (25%) is not yet enough samples to exactly pinpoint the probability of containment failure due to the explosion of accumulating hydrogen gas. However, combined with the fact this has been a major concern in all partial core meltdowns experienced so far, it is a figure we should all be concerned with. Containment failure due to hydrogen explosion is not an insignificant failure mode during meltdown, and I have yet to see it mitigated to any reasonably acceptable level.
So, to the nuclear industry out there. Zycronium cladding for the fuel rods is currently used in pretty much every installed reactor. I realize it was chosen due to its low neutron-capture cross-section, but, in operation, it has shown itself to be a significant liability during partial meltdown. It is time to go back to the drawing board and come up with an alternative that does not have this problem. Even if that means a degradation in performance. Until I see this happening, you have lost my support.
The British are excluding Sellafield from the tests. Obviously, with the likes of "Dirty thirty" and regular data falsification, they don't want anyone poking their nose in there. Anyways, this is no surpise as the stress tests are not binding. Countries can cop out on any excuse.
First thing I will say is that despite the criticisms of many "pro-nuclear" folk protesting that newer reactor facilities be built, the reactors themselves performed to specification. They scrammed, shutdown and survived the quake. What they did not survive was the negligence of the operator despite the BDIs known and circulated by GE and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
According to the Seismic design criteria for Nuclear facilities, S and B class facilities (those that contain radionuclides (S) or attached to pressure vessels that contain radionuclides (B) ) should not be affected by the loss of a C class facility (a support facility like a backup generator). The actual quake measured around 140Gal at Fukushima but the plant was designed to tolerate 600Gal (S class). As evidenced the C class facilities were not as the power lines were severed in the quake, and B class facilities (the pumps) were inundated by the tsunami. To quote World Nuclear Association(note that ALL reactor manufacturers and TEPCO are members of this organisation)
In March 2008 Tepco upgraded its estimates of likely Design Basis Earthquake Ground Motion Ss for Fukushima to 600 Gal, and other operators have adopted the same figure. (The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Taiheiyou-Oki earthquake in March 2011 did not exceed this at Fukushima.) In October 2008 Tepco accepted 1000 Gal (1.02g) DBGM as the new Ss design basis for Kashiwazaki Kariwa, following the July 2007 earthquake there.
Through two known Basis Design Issues (BDI or DBI if you want to be pedantic) it is demonstrated that a loss of electricity to the plant is the key factor for the loss of cooling for the reactor and the failure of the seals holding water in the spent fuel pools.
The first Basis Design Issue of the General Electric MK 1 reactor revealed comes from the tests of the reactor prototype by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Brunswick in the 1970's. Testers of the reactor prototype at Brunswick discovered that the reactor would leak when the internal pressure reached 70psi (they are operated at 65psi approx). Quite obviously this is the primary source of hydrogen that led to the explosion at Fukushima as this design has proven itself vulnerable to this kind of failure. The vessel is an "S" class facility.
The second is that a General Electric Nuclear reactor of that design requires a constant supply of power due to the nature of the refueling gate pairs that separate the reactor head from the spent fuel containment pool. I understand that, due to the nature of the seals on the gates, they need to be constantly powered to prevent a loss of coolant. Each pool has a volume of 1300 tons of water, they are 12 meters deep and there is 850 tons of water above the spent fuel in each (except for Fukushima reactor 1 spent fuel pool which is smaller by 400 tons). The failure mode for a loss of coolant event in those spent fuel pools was *exactly* in line with what would happen if plutonium in those spent fuel pools was exposed, hydrogen was produced and, subsequently, an explosion occurred. Without those spent fuel containment pools leaking there should have been several *months* to do something (60 Million calories per hour heating capacity in the spent fuel rods in reactor 1 spent fuel pool, 400Mcal/h in reactor 2 spent fuel pool, 200 Mcal/h in reactor 3 and 1600 Mcal/h in reactor 4)
This clearly proves that the backup power systems were absolutely essential to maintain the safe operation of the Mk1 GE reactor, yet at Fukushima they were not engineered to the same survivability criteria of the reactor for a known Basis Design Issue in *direct* contravention of the Seismic Design criteria for Reactor plants.
Along with the known basis design issues for a GE Mk 1 reactor (pressure vessel limits of 70psi, cooling pool seals require constant power) this is a clear cut case of criminal negligence at Fukushima. The importance of which, internationally, ca
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's been rightfully excluded. It's an external threat. Put in a security guard and fence and it is OK.
perhaps they should cede sovereignty on this in the same manner that Pakistani nuclear weapons are 'secured.'
So, you are worried about some nuclear power plant and some terrist attack, but you are not worried about a state like Pakistan starting a nuclear war with India? You are not worried that Israel is hair-trigger away from starting a war with Iran that would most likely end up a nuclear war (at least by Israel)? You are not worried about the dozens of times that nuclear war between USSR/Russia and US was averted because someone didn't want to press the button just yet?
Yes, let's be worried about stuff that is nearly impossible - the mighty terrorists will in some coordinated fashion manage to infiltrate and disable multiple automated safety systems that shut down a reactor because someone farted too laud in control room. Then they must disable multiple redundant cooling systems in the process. If you are worried about that, but you are not worried about a much more likely threat of an all out nuclear war, then your risk assessment is insane. Or are they simply going to infiltrate HAARP and cause a 1000m tsumami? - there are some nuts that believe that!
The media does not care one bit about what they report, as long as they get viewers. It doesn't matter that they lie - ratings trump reality!
A LFTR is a thorium based molten salt reactor.
Walk-away safe. Cheaper than coal. Inexhaustible supply of fuel.
The only problem is that we aren't even looking at it in the US.
Safety: http://energyfromthorium.com/2006/10/27/molten-salt-reactors-safety-options-galore-paper/
Google Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgKfS74hVvQ
It seems to me a lot of the bad mistakes made at Fukushima after the tsunami was because in power-out mode, very few of the sensors in the reactor building were working. No one knew what the water level was in the pressure vessel, spent fuel pools, or even if water was pouring out from the pressure vessel. Sensors could be wired to be able to be powered by remote batteries (even if the batteries need to be helicoptered in).
Of course avoiding a power-out situation is the best. Back-up generators can have problems. Having the ability to easily plug-in a generator that could be flown in by helicopter (in case of closed roads) is a must. At Fukushima they had problems connecting in replacement generators brought in after the accident.
Homer Simpson
are a dumb fuck.
in the sand. (Thought I was going to use another location, didn't you?)
example of head in the sand.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Shamelessly pulled from http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com
"One of the great Ironies of the nuclear renaissance, is the extent to which a small number of people who support a radical reactor design concept, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), have established an unique Internet knowledge base. People looking for information on reactor design, the uranium and thorium fuel cycles, and the relative merits of different reactors, the history of reactor design can find a great deal of relivant material on a relatively small number of internet sites. In particular, the Document Repository of Energy from Thorium offers an almost unique collection of documents related to the research and development of the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). Many documents that are listed as unavailable by the Information Bridge, can be found on line in "Energy from Thorium" document collection. It would be hard for me to fully express my admiration to Kirk Sorensen for his creration of this collection. God only knows who many hours Kirk put into this effort, but it represents a monumental contribution to making important knowledge available. To this Kirk adds his discussions in his blog. Finally, the Discussion Form of the "Energy from Thorium" blog is of unusual quality in applying technical information, both from the document repository, but also from more recent research, to developmental issues for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR)."
For further reading http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/10/ifr-and-lftr-safety-on-internet.html
http://energyfromthorium.com/faq/
That's an alarmist flame-bait headline. If they were indeed planning to carry out "stress tests" on nuclear reactors, that would be very foolish and criminal in many countries.
The headline is wrong.
From a quick skim of TFA, what they are actually proposing is much more sensible. They are proposing international peer reviews of the design and operation of nuclear reactors and an international safety standard for everyone to attain.
You just don't perform experiments or tests on nuclear reactors. That's one thing that we learned from Chernobyl. It's the law of the land in the UK and probably many other countries.
I'm afraid it's still to much to hope for accurate and non-sensational reporting of nuclear power matters.
Stick Men
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2225174&cid=36390518
Why'd you run away from answering a simple question there, troll?
Answer = Because it's clearcut proof drinkypoo's nothing but a damned troll, because he runs from answering a simple question that shows clearcut evidence drinkypoo is nothing but another "ne'er-do-well" slashdot troll.