India To Build A Thorium Reactor

In their first story, slowLearner writes "India will build a working Thorium reactor. [Quoting the Guardian] 'Officials are currently selecting a site for the reactor, which would be the first of its kind, using thorium for the bulk of its fuel instead of uranium – the fuel for conventional reactors. They plan to have the plant up and running by the end of the decade.'" Before anyone gets too excited, this is only a modified Heavy Water Reactor and not one of those fancy Molten Salt Reactors folks like Kirk Sorenson have been evangelizing for a while now.

Comments

Re:Well well

[garyebickford]

I worked on the control system for a nuclear plant maintenance robotic system back in 1990 (actually the controller was based on my design :) ). I learned something interesting about the nuclear power industry. The short version is - in France, nuclear power plants were considered machines, like airplanes. They were constructed and maintained like machines - they were all basically alike (in a given generation), and the differences were only in details of siting, etc. So each new one was just like the previous one, so everyone concerned knew pretty much how to avoid common problems like piping layout. And when a problem showed up in one, it would be fixed in all of them, much like FAA requires a problem in one 747 to be dealt with in every similar plane. (The paperwork for each 747, back when it was actual paper, weighed a significant fraction of the actual plane.)

In the US, these plants were considered buildings, and were designed (mostly in the 1960s and early 1970s) by architects (using components, but put together in different ways). So every facility is different. The architects generally weren't familiar in advance so had to learn while designing. As a result, many plants have things like pipes that go through a walkway at waist high, so the workers have to climb over or under it, and pipes that had to be re-routed on-site (often halting construction for a period of time) because they collided with another one in the design. (These were all designed before modern CAD systems had the capability to catch that.) And, because they are all different, a problem in one may or may not be found in any other, so there's no easy way to pro-actively fix problems that are found in one plant, because the design may not match in the correct way.

In an earlier job we were reviewing nuclear plant construction drawings with regard to the possibility of scanning them and generating CAD models. We found that the drawings in question were the worst engineering drawings we'd ever seen. They were essentially done without design rules, with multiple system layers all on one drawing - everything from concrete footers to electrical to plumbing all on one drawing, with pieces actually cut out and replaced by a redrawn section! I can't say that all plants were like this, but certainly this one was. It was unreadable by humans, much less computer scanners.

The plants we were working with also had radically different cleanliness standards - they are all run by independent companies, with different rules and traditions. One plant was so clean that the whole radon-in-houses problem was identified when a worker set off the radiation detectors going IN to the plant. The interior radiation level was maintained substantially lower than the ambient in the area - the place made 'hospital clean' look like a swamp. Others, based on what we heard, were more like that guy down the street with the cars in his yard.