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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.'"
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
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?
No not at all.
The "stress tests" phrasing comes from recent similar "stress tests" in the banking and finance industry where everyone important / major is guaranteed to pass, although they really want some more money etc.
Its a PR campaign, not a mechanical engineering accomplishment. The timing is even pretty similar, just long enough for the bad news to decay from the news cycle, and here comes "good news" that everyone passes the test.
Participation Trophies for All!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.'
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
because of some arrogant manager.
oh good then all should be safe - i haven't seen an arrogant manager in decades. :)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
The fuel rods are typically used for 3-4 years and go through several planned or emergency shutdowns, so normal SCRAM procedure does not make fuel unusable. A stopped reactor cannot be immediately restarted though, because of presence of neutron poisons such as Xe-135. While the chain reaction is still running, the neutron production is sufficient to overcome this barrier, but from a complete shutdown it's not easily possible. Chernobyl explosion was actually caused by an attempt to restart the reactor which was almost accidentally stopped (it was only supposed to go down to 50% output, but went to 5-10% by mistake) by removing all control rods in an attempt to restart the reaction, which it did, uncontrollably.
Boron injection however will require replacing the water and thorough cleaning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRAM
This concern is especially significant in a BWR, where injection of liquid boron would cause precipitation of solid boron compounds on fuel cladding, which would prevent the reactor from restarting until the boron deposits were removed.
Anything less than an A is unacceptable.
Everyone is fine with this until you tell them what it will cost.
I do agree that the top level should be personally liable though. And not just for large utilities, and even extending to things that don't directly result in loss of life. The threat of serious jail time and ineligability to ever be in such a position again if you screw up should come with the huge salary.
How do you even measure the risk associated with things that never actually happen?
If you asked somebody in 2007 what the chances of a major economic meltdown as a result of a housing price decline, every economist would have said "super low - it will never happen."
If you asked somebody in 1985 what the chances of the shuttle being destroyed with all hands they would have said 1 in 100,000 launches or whatever - right now the trend is closer to 1:75.
Now, we don't have enough data in either case to really put an accurate figure on the risk, but clearly the risks are much higher than were estimated.
The problem with modeling risk is that you don't account for anything not in your model, and chances are that things not in your model are the sorts of things most likely to cause a problem in the first place since otherwise you'd be mitigating the risk. It is also hard for people doing risk estimates to put failure modes like "management making stupid decisions" on the list with any kind of probability greater than "it never happens."
It was a combination of reactor design, the design of the test, and lack of knowledge about previous nuclear accidents in the USSR.
The root of the problem was the initial power spike caused by the flawed graphite-tip control rod design that displaced coolant before the neutron-absorbing boron carbide component of the rods entered the reactor.
But managers hadn't been told of a previous identical accident at a different power station, because all USSR nuclear workers were told that not a single accident had ever occurred at any Soviet plant. (There had been 19 IIRC). And it was this lack of knowledge that led to a chain of mistakes following the initial power spike.
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.
And it won't be a minor problem.
Watch this Heartland Institute video