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Would You Trust an 80-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor?
the_newsbeagle writes "The worst nuclear near-disaster that you've never heard of came to light in 2002, when inspectors at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power station discovered that a slow leak had been corroding a spot on the reactor vessel's lid for years (PDF). When they found the cavity, only 1 cm of metal was left to protect the nuclear core. That kind of slow and steady degradation is a major concern as the US's 104 reactors get older and grayer, says nuclear researcher Leonard Bond. U.S. reactors were originally licensed for 40 years of operation, but the majority have already received extensions to keep them going until the age of 60. Industry researchers like Bond are now determining whether it would be safe and economically feasible to keep them active until the age of 80. Bond describes the monitoring techniques that could be used to watch over aging reactors, and argues that despite the risks, the U.S. needs these aging atomic behemoths."
Meanwhile, some very, very rich individuals have taken an interest in the future of nuclear power.
I wouldn't trust an 80-year-old anything.
I thought for sure you were referring to Mr. Burns. No fear, Homer's watching the reactor core (between naps).
Like building new reactors to replace the old ones.
That's scary. I don't like it.
I wouldn't trust a nuclear reactor if it was a day old. What, it's not going to have a problem someday? What am I trusting here?
I will trust that whenever there is an accident, and there will be an accident, it will evolve into a problem that will take thousands of years to cure. All the nuclear meltdowns we've had are still going on.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Get rid of them, build new ones. Simple enough, but of course, there's always the usual group, saying how bad nuclear power is... The only thing that accomplishes is a mixture of more coal/natural gas power plants and increasingly old nuclear reactors, operating way beyond their designed lifespan.
I think it's pathetic that it's the 21st century, and we've harnessed the power of the atom to boil water to make steam to make electricity.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Well sure the regulators would not extend the license unless it was absolutely safe. And the power companies know they would get a painful slap on the wrist if anything went wrong.
If I learned anything from SimCity it was to never let your reactor stay online beyond its intended life - unless you have disasters turned off, of course.
because they weren't doing big nuclear reactions in 1932
Perhaps it depends on the contry, but I know that in France, each reactor is entirely dismount every 10 years to check everything.
But I have to admit that after 80 years, the technology seems really too old to be reliable...
Trust it? To give me power, Yes. But if it was offering me candy, No.
Wait, we are.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Who gives a shit.
All of americas infastructure is in the same condition. Built to last 30-40 years. And now going on 50, 60, 70, 80 years of use. Use above and beyond what they were ever designed to handle.
We all should give a shit. But it seems that.... no.. nobody does. we're not going to fix any of this shit until its a HUGE disaster.
Why?
I suspect we are too greedy for our own good.
I've never been big on the conspiracy theorys and nutjob ideas. But it really is starting to look like the 'powers that be' has decided america is going down. Let the shit fall apart and explode anyway that can happen. Bring it all down.
And then?
Go ahead and let's hear your brilliant idea for how to do it better. Don't have one? Then STFU.
I get real tired of people who cry about humanity not having a better solution for random problem X, as though there are people who could have that solution if only they weren't so lazy or mean and would just think it up. Not so much, actually.
The process currently requires that licensee demonstrate using technical analysis that the vessel is fully capable of performing its design function for the entire licenses period. As long as technical analysis demonstrate that the vessel will continue to function, why not allow the plants to extend their license indefinitely? If the stress on the vessel due to cooldowns, heatups, and neutron flux is less than the margin for performing its design function, then preventing a extending license is an action based on fear not science.
A common misconception is that plants were only initially licensed for 40 years due to technical concerns. As it turns out the AEC (the predecessor to the NRC) just picked an arbitrary amount of time to issue operating licenses. There was not a technical basis to the 40 year time period. That being said, some manufactures may have used the 40 year time period as a design input for reactor designs. However there is no mysterious phenomenon that causes the reactor to turn into a pumpkin.
dont_forget
Because we don't do sensible things like reprocess much spent fuel, even after these things shut down usually they have become some sort of simi-active nuclear grave yard for another 10-20 years before all the fuel is cool enough for transport to suitable longer term storage (which we don't have much of).
If you run these things out to 80 years, they will be 100 years old in many cases before operations really cease. Granted after the initial shutdown, risk drops off pretty fast, there is only so much that can go wrong with what amounts to a big swimming pool but still.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I don't trust the guys running the damn things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
Do you?
No really, I came within a cat's whisker of having a terrible blowout at highway speed and being crunched by an 18 wheeler.
But what actually happened is I didn't drive anywhere today, so I didn't have a blowout, so I didn't lose control of my car, so I wasn't crunched by an 18-wheeler.
WHEW, that was close!
OH, and the Davis-Besse reactor didn't cause any probvlems either.
Never trust a reactor over 30.
-Dave
Would You Trust an 80-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor?
We trust 50-60 year old aircraft to carry thermonuclear weapons. Not saying it's a good idea but it's being done as we speak. Even some of the cargo birds they normally use to shift nuclear warheads are not exactly spring chickens.
Quote:
Task Force Conclusions
The lessons learned task force (LLTF) concluded that the DBNPS VHP
nozzle leakage and RPV head degradation event was preventable. While
this review was primarily introspective, this question could not be
answered without considering industry activities and DBNPS’s per-
formance. At DBNPS, early indications of RPV corrosion were missed
such as radiation element system filters being clogged by boric acid and
corrosion fines, the build up of boric acid deposits on containment air
cooler fins and large amounts of boric acid deposits on the RPV head.
The task force concluded that the event was not prevented because: (1)
the NRC, DBNPS, and the nuclear industry failed to adequately review,
assess, and follow-up on relevant operating experience, (2) DBNPS
failed to assure that plant safety issues received appropriate attention,
and (3) the NRC failed to integrate known or available information into
its assessments of DBNPS’s safety performance. Furthermore, an NRC
investigation concluded that DBNPS did not adequately execute the
boric acid corrosion control program in response to an NRC Generic
Communication, and the NRC did not adequately review the industry
implementation of long term commitments, such as the commitment to
maintain a boric acid corrosion control program.
The problem is not the age of the reactor, but proper implementation of safety reviews. I hope this will be changed.
I get the feeling the industry is making excuses to save money. I just don't buy that the anti-nuclear group is running the whole show.
Whenever industry - any industry- points fingers at environmentalists, lawyers, politicians, or anything else, they are lying.
Industry has Congress in their pockets. They can thumb their noses at environmentalists or anyone else.
When a company says, " We can't do 'x' because of liability or whatever" they are making excuses to cover their ass so that they don't have to admit - "We're not doing 'x' because we don't make as much money."
That is ALWAYS the real reason - not enough money.
Current technologies for reprocessing fuel are very dangerous and extremely expensive. It only works in France due to the huge government subsidies, and last I heard they're considering suspending operations. Even if you ignore the fact that some of the plutonium will get lost, it still doesn't make sense economically.
Start letting industry build new ones! There are some excellent modern designs which would be a great improvement on safety and even some that can help us dispose of high level long half life waste by converting it to stuff with shorter a half life. We are simply storing this stuff at the plant that generates it right now and that's CRAZY. We should be using it to generate power with these new reactor designs.
Start reprocessing all the spent fuel into forms where we can use it again. There is 40 plus years of used fuel assemblies just sitting inside these plants that could be reprocessed and reused with the side benefit of making the physical size of the high level waste much smaller and easier to handle. The waste can be encased in glass or ceramics and made ready for long term storage. Which brings me to the final thing we need to do...
Get one or more high level waste sites completed ASAP so we can start dealing with the *real* problem here. I'm worried more about the thousands of fuel assemblies just sitting in storage pools corroding than the danger from aging power plants springing leaks and melting down. We need to get this really dangerous stuff into more secure locations and stabilized environment where it can be stored in a more permanent way.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I trust the sun.
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me."
Break down the one old reactor with the most spent fuel, and dispose of all the waste including the spent fuel. In return you can have two shiny new reactors of the most modern design. Repeat.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I wouldn't trust one built 80 years ago. I would be more likely to trust that one built today can run 80 years safely. We have learned a lot since we started making reactors and they have gotten safer over the years. (I know that there aren't reactors that old yet, but the point is the oldest still operating were not designed for that life span; the newer ones have a better chance of being engineered for longer life.)
Fusion has been 50 years away for over 50 years. The U. S. doesn't want to use spent fuel to produce energy ... it is a loophole that enables stockpiling plutonium as "waste".
But it is so cute that they try.
which goes on, why not just let it happen?
If humanity as a whole (1 % + 99 %) can't get their act together - as a whole - the whole thing will go poof! Either on a economic, environmental, resource, genetic (radiation), military conflict level, or all factors taken together, the thing may not be viable long term - well, in a frame of some k years.
They did not learn their lesson and vanish - not worth continuing to exist...
...nuclear reactor determines people's lifespan.
mr burns will keep them running without paying for upkeep and just pay off the nuclear inspectors
I trust a machine to run in a manner roughly consistent with what is to be expected due to entropy, it's own and the system it happens to reside in, plus any others it has contact with. Whether or not I trust the people that are supposed to be performing work against said entropy is another matter.
If you let con-men run the show, incompetents pretend to do the work, and otherwise starve the effort of what it needs to succeed, don't act all shocked when you are left holding the proverbial radioactive bag after they get through with it. This is the price of engineered ignorance and half-assed stewardship.
Can it work? Of course. Is it worth the cost? That depends, probably not. Will it work? Chances are grim: There is usually too much that could be screwed up that could be simply covered over with a shiny smiley face on a output system like that.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The Brooklyn Bridge is over 130 years old. No reason a properly designed and maintained reactor couldn't last that long as well.
1) Just to be clear: There are NO 80 year old reactors. If Chicago-Pile 1 was still operating, it would turn 70 this year. The oldest currently operating nuclear reactor is the Oyster Creek facility. This reactor came online December 23rd 1969 making it 42 years old curerntly. This is according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_Creek_Nuclear_Generating_Station
2) All NRC regulated reactors have maintenance performed on the systems every outage, to the point that much of the facility is newer than the day it turned on. This is due to maintenance and repair activity, as well as upgrades to improve efficiency. The article calls this "midlife refurbishment". The industry does this because it is easier and less costly than a new reactor. The thought process of the industry is that it is easier to tear down and rebuild under the existing license than it is to get approval for a new license. If the industry could feasibly replace a reactor vessel, I would bet they would.
3) ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section 3 is a good code. Creep, Fatigue, Corrosion, and many other issues are addressed in this code that the non-nuclear codes for B&PV only tough upon exotic need, and then refer the engineer to the section 3 code. I encourage you to read it.
4) Some reactor operators send material samples to the Advanced Test Reactor at the INL for accelerated radiation age testing. This information is sought by the reactor operators to gain a better understanding for themselves about their own equipment.
5) Reactors are designed for a much longer life than 40 years, but the NRC set the 40 year license to force a mid-life review. Reactors get far better treatment than any car or plane that most people have ever have ridden in. In this context, a 40 year old reactor properly maintained is very possibly not a safety concern.
6) The Davis-Besse RPV head mentioned by the article was a case of criminal conduct in the eyes of some people, and is not considered normal operating behavior by people I have met from the industry. Whatever the facts are, the indictment can be found here. http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/documents/indictment.pdf
7) Reactors designed to operated under the NRC have a "defense in depth" safety approach. The reactor and facilities are given a design basis accident that is a conservative forecasting of potential accident scenarios.
8) The NRC has a glossary available to you http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary.html note the term "meltdown" is not there. Many people associated with the nuclear field feel that it is a poor term that does not adequately describe a problem's behavior or severity. This is borne out of the use of the term for several reactor failures that all had different designs, behaviors, and severity of failure.
9) New reactor designs offer some stimulating improvements. The Generation 4 reactor effort can be found at http://www.gen-4.org/ currently the US is operating Gen 2 reactors.
what arbitrary number is it that it becomes unsafe?
One dead senate pro-nuke shill.
I didn't see where the '80 year old' tag came from -- suggests on the face of it that the reactor was built in the 1920s, seems a bit off. Technology can be damn dangerous when we are overstretching our understanding. Ask anyone who planned on flying the Comet, lived next to an early steam power plant, etc. Point is that we only make these things safe and acceptable by allowing them to develop over time. While aviation and steam power did get some slack cut to allow safe practices to evolve, nuclear hasn't. Partially because of fear and greed, partially because of insane management. Plants were built with the assumption that someone would have a strategy to deal with spent fuel -- but no one wants to deal with this, so the spent fuel rods pile up at the plants. Definitely a hazard that the designers were not anticipating. So we can have the promise of nuclear power to the extent that we are willing to let it develop as the other technologies we rely on have. Or we can let our fears lock us into a world where the unresolved problems of the old nuclear plants come back to haunt us. I don't see much in the way of a happy medium.
The only 80 year old thing I trust is Glenlivet.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
The profit motive. As long as for-profit companies are running nuclear power plants, pennies will be pinched and corners will be cut. It's a question of when, not if.
Cases in point: the location of the Fukishima reactor, U.S. plants turning off earthquake sensors to save money, U.S. plants wanting to stop evacuation drills, and the top U.S. regulator being forced out because he (gasp) wanted to focus on safety. Which costs money.
New technology is great, but we need to get the profit motive out of nuclear power if we're going to have it be safe and sustainable.
and most of them run as well as anything made yesterday. It's all in how you build it. Build it robust and to last and it can go for a lot more then 80 years.
This does require maintenance. Those old machines loved their oil. Some of them literally bathed in it. Likewise, I don't know if I'd trust anything that hadn't been maintained in 80 years. But if it's getting constant attention and was built properly then there's no reason it couldn't last practically forever.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm assuming you are writing about TMI. The instrumentation wouldn't have been considered up to legal standards of even a fertilizer plant at the time, the "clean and safe" myth had won out and allowed some dangerous corner cutting to save cash. Nothing that generates large amounts of heat is safe unless you take care to make it so.
It's not like designing a lift with a known safety factor. These things are all prototypes to an extent. You don't go to the moon on Apollo 1, and you can't expect the first reactor of any design to be perfect.
Have taken an interest in Nuclear Power...?
Glad to see someone is rich enough to be addressing the WASTE problem.
Let's offer them the job of paying to decommission what's out there 1st.
80 years is scary. Trojan nuclear reactor on the Columbia river was needing a new steam generator after
an inspection discovered cracked tubing and people voted to close it down, and deemed it too expensive.
Before it even recovered the energy it took to build it. Now the only thing left is the wasted fuel in the pools on site.
No one to pay for the disposal, no site available.
Age is not the main factor, can it still do what it was designed to do, safely, is the question. I mow my grass with an 8-N Ford tractor (around 1949), nearly all small farms keep one around for odd jobs; not 80 years yet, but will still be running fine when it is. Ford didn't design them to last forever, but with modern oils they probably will.
The newer ones were built in a much stronger regulatory climate, which is not to say a much more stringent one, but instead one in which the regulations were constantly changing during construction.
As a result, newer plants have a lot of "engineering modifications" on top of their original designs, and every one of those modifications is a potential point of failure because the system was not considered as a whole when the regulation was decided, and the minimum delta necessary to comply with the regulations is what will have been done instead. This is generally called 'regulatory hurdle jumping', and it's pretty typical of any large construction project that's actively opposed by one or more special interest groups, who will throw every obstacle they possibly can in the way in the hopes that one of them stops the project, or if not stops it, makes it economically nonviable. For example, in the San Francisco Bay area, the Bay bridge design was changed many times from the original design by Frank Lloyd Writ into some monstrosity with huge cost overruns, and then there was a curve added that wasn't there before which has resulted in hundreds of car accidents.
I'd actually be surprised if the operators of older plants actively looked for any but the most egregious problems, considering that any repairs they make will end up having to conform to current regulations, and might well result in huge numbers of changes. The resulting hodge-podge of spit an bailing wire would no doubt be significantly more dangerous than just ignoring minor issues until they became too big to ignopre.
I trust a several billion year old nuclear reactor to rise in the east every morning.
We should not have first gen ANYTHING after 40 years, let alone 80.
What is needed is to get 2 types of reactors going:
1) the GE PRISM which is an IFR.
2) A thorium reactor such as designed by General Atomics or FLIBE
3) small reactors under 50 MW (thorium or uranium, though thorium is more likely) that have high thermal temps.
The GE PRISM is an Integrated Fast Reactor. What this brings to the table is that you load it up with a small amount of regular uranium AND a large amount of nuke 'waste'. It will then burn the waste and leave a fraction of the waste remaining. In addition, the waste that is left lasts about 200 years, vs. the 20K years from our current 'waste'. These reactors are less than 300 MW in size. That means that it can be built in factories SAFELY and drives the prices way down. More importantly, these can be placed on the sites of these OLD reactors and then burn up the waste. Now, that may not sound interesting to some, but, the fact is, that all of these plants have transmission lines in place, generators, cooling, isolation from local community, etc. IOW, these are ideal sites to locate these new prism. Most importantly, they already have the FUEL sitting there. That fuel is the waste from the old plants. Now, these PRISMS can be loaded and burned for another 50-100 years.
So, for this ohio plant, it currently has about 900 MW capability. In addition, it has been running since 1978, with license expiration in 2017. 40 years worth of 'waste' is sitting there waiting to be shipped to WIPP. However, by installing 4-5 of these reactors on site, it will give them 1.2-1.5 GW. IOW, 33-66% more. In addition, as these new reactors are placed on-line, they will be re-fueled with the 'waste'. So, there will be no new fuel after the initial load. While these are running, the old reactors are torn down and shipped out. However, the fuel is not. As such, there is little chance of accidents. Right now, there is ~1000 tonnes of nuclear waste sitting on site. If this is shipped out via train, it will take many loads. The reason is that this waste MUST be kept in moderators and shielding. which take up a lot of room and weight. And if by truck, well, MUCH longer.
However, once the PRISM is done with it, about 1/20 of the waste will remain. IOW, about 50 tonnes. Of that, more than half will be gone over 5 years (short half-lives). So that leaves 25 tonnes. And what remains then, is relatively safe. You can send this on one short train without any issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It would have been damn stupid to license them for any other duration. Forty years is about the minimum for the operators to feel confident about the horizon to recover their capital cost, and it gives you a long time to gain experience (which was thin on the ground in the 1960s) about how long this kind of facility actually lasts.
The forty year original term had ZERO absolutely ZERO implications on whether anyone back then believed these reactors would run another zero to fifty years after the original license term, and I'm sure many suspected that even making it to forty years was something to be hoped for and not necessarily expected, no matter what was stated in the original design guidance.
In engineering terms, there's no other way to do it. The problems begin when graft enters the license extension process, and when the expensive process of monitoring how well your facility is holding up is forsaken in exchange for a corporate jet and a lot of fancy dinners in Washington.
its a nuclear reactor, a scientific-techie thing..
so, what can possibly go wrong ?
In India, Govt. and dozens of all their technical panels trust 116 year old dam at Mullaperiyar in an earth quake zone.
So, why not USA, the most advanced country in the world.
It is QUITE telling that you would rather take a lot of death spread over a large surface, rather than a single spike, even if that spikes has a lower death and economical impact overall (yes, the cost of fukushima is billions, but the cost of the thousand of death due to coal emission pollution have a yearly comparable cost too, and fuku/tchernobyl do happens relatively rarely).
Me I would rather have a spike which is more controllable with added security, rather than non controllable few regular death over all the country. Especially when the industry causing those death (coal burning pollution) ALSO is the same industry which actively into emitting a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. Two bird one stone : new nuke plant are more secure, and will only pollute locally if breaking, whereas coal/oil pollute globaly, kill globally each years and participate into fucking our climate globally. Not a tough choice IMHO.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Isnt nuclear power. It's people. People get lazy, let things go unmaintained to cut costs. It's insane, really. I do work with a power plant that processes methane and creates electricity from burning it off old dumps, and the safety checks they go through are rigorous, they have annual teardowns of the generators to make sure nothing breaks and causes a major shutdown of it (they're basically modified ship engines designed to burn methane rather than diesel.) What you don't see are rigorous checks on nuclear power plants like this. Which baffles me to no end, considering nuclear fuel is much more hazardous when it goes critical vs. methane, which has local temporary effects if it blows (and you wont even see the flames) No one takes nuclear seriously enough to harness it.
Replace them all with something that runs virtualised XML in the cloud with noSql. Much more enterprisy
It's not if we TRUST them, the question is ARE they safe or not ?
And since I'm no constructional engineer, nuclear physicist and I haven't done any test on the dam plant: I don't know.
People do.
The sad thing is, that the anti-nuclear-power-lobby is actively fighting against upgrading existing reactors or building new ones. This plays right into the hands of the power-companies who want to keep these old reactors as long as possible to make the maximum amount of profit.
Fine. You can lead the way.
What? You're unwilling to give up your nice house, computer, car/motorcycle/bicycle, etc...?
Saving resources is only part of the puzzle. It's been a while since I did the calcs, but shifting to 100% electric vehicles would increase the average* family's electricity usage by ~50%. You can indeed do a bunch of power shifting in such a scenario to keep demand even, such that you'd need a lot less than 50% build up in power lines and such, and you certainly wouldn't need 50% more generators, but you would need a substantial shift towards more baseload generators in such a scenario, and baseload is where nuclear excels.
Fact is, lighting is only 12% of the current power bill, so even if we went completely dark, we'd still be at 38% over current household consumption. Indeed, the only way to get us back down would be to eliminate the energy spent on heating and cooling, including heating water. Eliminating that would require complete rebuilding of most of the homes and apartments inside the USA - it takes a completely different design philosophy to make homes that don't need active heating/cooling. If we just look to increase efficiency Heat pumps are great, but expensive. However, much of the heating in the USA is done directly by buring NG, propane, fuel oil, etc, not using electricity. So it's quite possible that for every home you save electricity by installing a heat pump instead of direct resistive current, you're going to end up using MORE joules of electricity by converting the gas and oil systems over to electric heat pumps.
Conclusion: In order to save power we're going to need power. I say build away with modern, safer, nuclear plants so you can retire the old ones, and reduce the amount of coal/oil burned.
*average driving habits, average power bill, average electric car mileage, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
This kind of "well its expensive and we depend on it, so lets just rubber stamp operating extensions" is the exact same kind of thinking that caused Fukushima. Fukushima was originally slated to retire in March of 2011(Obligatory Simpsons, "it was just one month away from retirement!"), but was rubber stamped in early 2011 and licensed to operate another 10 years...cept for obviously it didnt quite last that long.
Now granted the tsunami still probably would have still created a situation at Fukushima as even if it was slated to stop generating power in March 2011, it would still have been a while before they reached cold shutdown, but they would have been in the process of shutting it down AND they wouldnt have hesitated when it came to pouring sea water on the reactors, as they were due to be de-commissioned anyway.
Monstar L
To me your post looks deceptive, so I'm going to expand upon it a bit.
By law, every reactor must carry the maximum amount of private insurance possible*. Currently, this is $375M. For $860k, which gives you that the insurance companies think there's roughly a .22% (yes, less than 1%) chance that they'll have to pay out.
Add up all the benefits and my auto insurance is roughly $450k worth of benefits. Annual premium is ~$1k. Seems they think that I'm about as likely to have an accident as the nuke plant (.22%).
In the event of an accident, after the deducible you get the $375M in insurance, and after that it's a cooperative insurance pool - each owner gets to pony up that $111.9M per reactor. At 104 reactors at the moment, that's a total liability of $1.2B before the federal government gets involved.
Look at Deepwater Horizon. The federal government typically gets involved LONG before $1.2B in damage during an industrial accident. Heck, a really bad non-nuclear industrial accident could bust those levels and trigger superfund status(also federally subsidized). In exchange, nuclear plants have to follow the directions of the NRC. Personally, given that we haven't had a really major accident since TMI, I figure they're doing their jobs.
If nothing else, a damaged reactor isn't going to be producing power, which means they aren't getting the income. They still have to pay to clean/fix up their mess - all that money is only for liability to others.
Same with airline safety - sure, they'd like to save costs on maintenance, but a crashed plane isn't going to be earning them any revenue, even completely discounting fewer people flying with them due to the negative publicity.
With all this being said, I'll say this: I'd still prefer to build a number of NEW nuclear reactors with the specific goal in mind of shutting down the worst polluting fossil fuel plants and the least safe legacy nuclear ones.
*Within certain rules of 'possible'.
I don't read AC A human right
Nuclear power is awesome, and as population grows it becomes ever more needed. Currently, there are ~200 plants in the US, and 20% of US power comes from nuclear power. .1% for every single reactor, THAT IS HUGE. each power plant provides for over 300,000 people. Because of that we can't afford to just shut one down without a replacement. And by current laws we can not build any new nuclear facilities.
These laws are perpetuated by irrational fear. Nuclear power is scary, and has horrible potential, which is why we make damn sure it is as safe as humanly possible. This leads to more deaths involving people falling into hydro electric turbines than people dying to nuclear power. But we don't hear about that, instead we hear about these stories which keeps the fear going, and when it comes time to try and allow more to be constructed, everyone thinks "hell no, we already have that bomb in the backyard, we don't need another" when the fact is new plants aren't bombs.
TLDR: change law, allow new plants to be constructed, and shut down the old ones.
Seems to be the way of the world these days.
Actually, I wonder if they are too big to build. It seems like we have lost the ability to conceive/build things on that scale anymore.
Sorry for the AC but couldn't remember my login.
I worked Radiation Protection for 10 years including steam generator replacements at Cook and Palo Verde. During the refueling process high preasure pipes, valves, reactor vessels, steam generators, and the safety systems are tested. If something is found to be out of spec it is replaced right then or scheduled for the next cycle depending on the severity. Steam generators, reactor vessels, reactor vessel lids, and safety related systems will all be replaced at least once during the lifertime of the plant so that 80 year old plant isn't really 80 years old.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The reactor casing has corroded down to 3/8 of an inch, but was not continuing to corrode. That 3/8 of an inch corresponds to the stainless steel layer within the casing, and thus is resistant to the boric acid corrosion. Now, stainless steel WILL corrode over time, but at a much slower rate. TFS makes it seem like if the corrosion continued, we were only 3/8 of an inch away from a meltdown. Actually, the reactor would have continued fine until that steel casing failed somehow, which would have to be due to some other cause.
Putting the brakes on all upgrades, improvements and replacements of all nuclear plants for almost 40 years and guess what? The old plants were kept running because all the green hippie trust fund liberals weren't about to go without the electricity they provided either.
So good luck with that.
....to radiate you.. just like if you deal with fire enough you will get burned, or work with wood, you will get a splinter, etc...
Not a troll, but even one of the greatest nuclear disasters of all time is STILL RUNNING, (which is scary enough as it is). As long as the reactor was built with proper safeguards, and not built in an earthquake zone, there shouldn't be any problems.
You've made a factually inaccurate statement and offered no evidence whatsoever to support your claim, so I'm just going to ignore it.
Look, Al Gore, the environmentalist darling, got more popular votes for President than any man in US history ever. Did he win the election? I rest my case. US environmentalists have less power than the Boy Scouts of America.
Nuclear power plants stopped being built when the Price-Anderson act expired, because they are not economically feasible without taxpayer sponsorship. Building resumed immediately when Dick Cheney re-authorized Price-Anderson, which now includes a per-watt subsidy from the taxpayer pocketbook.
Look it up. That is a complete and accurate answer to your first question, and your second statement is provably false - "greenies" did not shut down the building of nuke plants, banks and insurance companies did, as soon as taxpayers stopped funding construction.
In the fact-based world, nuclear power generation requires tax dollars to make a profit. It's a fundamentally socialist technology that cannot compete in the marketplace without government funding. Look it up, seriously - don't take my word for it. Price-Anderson act.
Just from the very short description of the Branson- and Gates-backed designs, they sound great. But who stands to profit from them should they be built? If GE or Westinghouse or some other corporate behemoth that already has political clout can't be sure they'll profit in big ways, politicians won't allow things to move in that direction. Instead we'll be stuck with some suboptimal "solution." You see what happened with HD Radio. Nobody was guaranteed to make out big besides the Ibiquity backers, so that's what we got, sorry as it is.
Not unless you've got daylight 24/7. You're on the wrong planet mate.
See:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html ...specifically the sections on "Regulatory Ratcheting" and "Regulatory Turbulence".
The problem was not the design by GE-Hitachi (foreigners are not allowed to own businesses in Japan), it was installation without appropriate siting. One of the reactors original designers, Yukiteru Naka, wanted to resite the diesel generators and batteries, but TEPCO would have none of it, See this Japan Times article from a little over a year ago:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20110714a2.html
The article also pretty clearly indicates that Toshiba, who manufactured the plants, also had misgivings, since all BWR's in the US were sited on rivers, rather than on the ocean.