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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.
Like building new reactors to replace the old ones.
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.
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...
That's the same thing as saying airplanes are inherently unsafe and using your car to get from A to B is much safer.
Guess what. Neither statement is true.
I never understood why it takes 1000s of years to clean up a steam leak from a nuclear power plant, when thriving cities have had atom bombs dropped on them without stopping them from being thriving cities today (with albeit, an interruption from normal business and a whale of a mess to clean up).
I agree political opposition is a big problem, but afaict the capital costs and potential liability are a big problem as well.
The biggest problem is liability, which I believe is currently covered by a government guarantee. It is puzzling, though, that nobody big will take on construction of a nuclear plant without substantial government liability protection and guarantees. Dick Cheney even said that "nobody" would build a plant without that protection, because they don't want to take on the potentially unlimited liability if something really bad happens. But why would you be worried about a risk of an accident that basically can't happen due to modern safety protections? Skeptics suspect this reveals that the risk isn't as close to 0% as claimed. Another explanation is that it is but the management of power companies are out of date with their information, or irrationally conservative on the matter.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wait, we are.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I believe that the fallout from nuclear weapons has very short half-lives.
Well the biggest reason is that a total meltdown at a nuclear reactor would release a LOT more radiation than the atomic bombs we dropped back in WWII.
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
If you're a private investor and want reliable, easy, predictable returns why not go with a coal/gas fired plant? No politician is going to come along and shut it down because of an accident in Japan, you won't need to deal with protestors looking for any tiny issue to sue over, and you don't need to worry about waste because it just goes straight into the atmosphere! Also it's a much smaller expenditure up-front, because nuclear reactors are much cheaper to build even if they last much longer and are cheaper to run.
The risks of nuclear, from an investors point of view, aren't really about safety risks.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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
Slight difference being that neither planes nor cars present an ecological disaster for thousands of years when they malfunction.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
The half lives are the same. But actinides build up over time and the residual beta activity in used fuel rods is many, many orders of magnitude greater than that from instantaneous kiloton fissions.
Yeah, it's all the fault of those damn greenies. There's no way the entrenched powers who actually control things could possibly have anything to do with it - secretly, you know, a bunch of dirty hippy flower children control all the world's investment banks, that explains everything!
Let's face it, in the USA "greens" have less power than dog fanciers. This Rush Limbaugh meme of blaming them for all US nuclear power issues is hilarious.
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
If anything is active for thousands of years, it's easy enough to carefully scoop it up and bury it as nuclear waste. Hundreds of years, maybe, but let's not exaggerate.
Where did you hear it would take 1000s of years? 10s definitely, maybe 100s, but not 1000s. Also, at the height both nuclear attacks detonated, almost all the reaction byproducts were swept up in to the stratosphere and dispersed over a much larger radius than, for instance, Chernobyl.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
People keep comparing the deaths per capita from nuclear to things like car and plane accidents and especially other methods of power generation. I would suggest its NOT A USEFUL METRIC.
Our society has the means to absorb the geographically dispersed individual and and handfuls of people lost in car wrecks each day all over the place. Even the the total number is large, its dilute and the long term loss of economic resources such as land is minimal. The odd air craft accident that claims a few hundred is more painful but still manageable.
The slow deaths from coal and such get spread out across decades of somewhat elevated medical expenses and environmental clean up projects. Even an major accident like a slag spill can be contained and cleaned up with conventional equipment and means.
A major Chernobyl or Fukushima like accident however rare stands to displace tens of thousands of people at once and render major economic assets and surrounding land unusable for decades, all at once! That is the sort of thing that derails entire economies.
Its the difference between being shot and say having HIV. Over the long haul HIV and sympathetic infections probably do more total harm, but its spread out you can live with it for a long time. The bullet on the other though it might kill few cells on initial impact, often does enough damage that its immediately catastrophic anyway.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
Fine, hundred of years, are you saying you think it's ok to produce toxic waste, as long as you bury it somewhere? And what happens when you run out of places to put it? This is one planet, how long do you think it will take for us to places to put it? What happens when there's an earthquake and the container vault cracks? Seeps into groundwater? That's one of our problems, the lack of foresight. Meanwhile, we have solutions that are clean and work but we ignore them.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
I can buy that, but then why was there so much noise about renewing the Price-Anderson disaster-liability limitation? If there aren't really safety risks with new plants, why does the nuclear industry care about being indemnified from them?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.)
It depends on the details of the accident, what you want to classify as "safe", and what percent of contaminated land you want to declare "safe" (if you're talking about the core itself, you could get figures as high as "millions of years").
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
It's much easier to scare people about nuclear power than, say, cars. Greens have little power in the US because the American consumer doesn't want to change their lifestyle to do anything particularly "green". However, the same consumer is perfectly willing to let the Greens shut down nuclear plants with lawsuits because it doesn't affect them in any way they can perceive.
The irony is, of course, that the car and other pollution problems are the ones that are the real dangers, but the Greens are only really effective at scaring us into not using the only power source we have that could reasonably compete with fossil fuels for base power generation using well-tested technology.
And I don't see what Rush Limbaugh has to do with any of it, except that he is probably against the leftist policies that tend to come with Green Party politics. I imagine he is just as fine with drilling for more oil as he is with more nuclear plants.
Nuclear disasters are disasters in slow motion. Yes, it's possible for radiation to have a fast kill, but most of the concerns are over very slow kills. Aka, you can't *stay* in the area. It's a disaster you can run from. Heck, it's a disaster you could crawl from. So the death tolls are generally going to be very low. The damage is economic, because while you can escape it, you can't *ignore* it. You can't just stay in a contaminated area. You can't just haul away and reuse contaminated infrastructure. You can't farm on contaminated land. Taking dozens of kilometers in all directions out of commission for decades is generally a devastating economic hit.
Even if lots of people don't die.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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...
So you've never brought a car in for a checkup and either gotten a clean bill of health or some minor fixes, and been told everything is running great, only to have something major bad happen not that long after?
If you haven't, I bet someone you know has.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
I completely agree. Maybe it would make sense to allow nuclear plant licenses to be transfered to new plants built next to or near by when the old plant would be decommisioned. I also believe that Yucca Mountain should finally be put to use. Storing nuclear waste onsite is crazy dangerous compared to storing it at a place such as Yucca Mtn. It may not be the ideal solution, but, it's the best solution available now.
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
...nuclear reactor determines people's lifespan.
mr burns will keep them running without paying for upkeep and just pay off the nuclear inspectors
So this is why you should build such nuclear power plants *AWAY* from sensitive areas with high population densities or upstream from critical infrastructure. It is also why you try to be careful about your designs and don't do stupid things like using flammable graphite as a moderator (Chernobyl) or building on fault lines (Fukushima).
Japan will struggle with their economic issues for years, but they will survive. Russia had more issues to start with and are facing a much larger impact from Chernobyl but one could argue they survived at least partially. Three Mile Island was a financial mess, but I dare say we survived that just fine. So I think you are wrong.
The safety of nuclear power *far* exceeds that of coal or gas when you factor in everything from the obtaining of the fuel to the decommissioning and disposal of the plant when it's worn out. And I'm including the accidents from nations that are not so sensitive or caring about their people or environment.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Then why hasn't a new nuclear plant been built in the last twenty or so years? Greenies shut that down after Three Mile Island and it's only been recently that new ones have been approved.
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 Japanese Prime Minister at the time, Naoto Kan said that the risk of cascading failures of multiple plants could have led to half of Japan's surface area becoming uninhabitable, and that this was an unacceptable risk.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Let's face it, in the USA "greens" have less power than dog fanciers
Bull fucking shit.
Ever hear of the northern gateway pipeline in Canada? There's thousands of fake petitioners on the committee hearing list for the environmental oversight meeting up here in Canada placed on there by various groups linked directly to Tides Foundation Canada, and the Tides Foundation in the US. Including people in other countries who didn't sign up.
They do it in Canada, they do it in the US. If you don't think they do, you're woefully ignorant.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
Even a hypothetical foolproof reactor will not prevent a class action lawsuit if disease rates go up in the vicinity of the reactor.
Nuclear is such a boogyman that correlation may equal causation for a jury.
Would you want to take that risk?
He'd be just as much of a NIMBY if someone were to try and build a power plant (gas, coal, nuke) near his precious home digs, too (he lives in Coral Gables, FL, no?). He doesn't have to do that, though, because the basic probability of that happening already are near zero, not when there's cheaper locations to build, with lower socio-economic factors around them that can be bribed with "it'll bring more jobs to the area". It's a total win-win for His Smugness.
For similar effect, wind back the histrionics machine for the project to finish I-90 in Seattle. Mercer Island was basically putting the kibosh on it ("oh, it'll ruin our property values!" and other similar squealings), until various expensive mods were made to it through there (the "lids", a couple of convenient exits), and yet the political fireball was really about the damn uppity people living near Rainier Ave. that were going to be affected by it (loss of homes, no lids, no exits to the area, etc), who found some allies to get some sort of equity out of things from WADOT that the Mercer Island folks were getting. (Rainier Ave: poor, not-white. Mercer Island: rich, white).
Me, personally? I'd keep the nukes going, but that's just trying to be rational.
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.
Simple enough, but of course, there's always the usual group, saying how bad nuclear power is
Ask them if they will agree to work with you to reduce the amount of nuclear waste we have piled up, and for the society if they will agree that leaving 300,000 year waste is irresponsible.
Ask them if they will agree that we can build machines to convert that 300,000 year waste into 300 year waste.
Ask them if it's OK to capture excess heat from that process and use it for productive purposes.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Juries don't necessarily bother with correlation either. The movie Erin Brockovich is a fun movie to watch, and it is based on what really happened, problem is, as I understand it, actual cancer rates in the affected area are below the statistical average.
That science stuff is complicated, I'll vote on the jury based on how I feel. Legally, there should have been a "preponderance of evidence" against PG&E before 1 dollar was awarded in damages.
A major Chernobyl or Fukushima like accident however rare stands to displace tens of thousands of people at once
Yes, 64 and one heard attack = tens of thousands !!one.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
you can't *ignore* it. You can't just stay in a contaminated area.
Tell that to people living in Guarapari. In your mind they all died off thousands of years ago.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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
Those bomb on Japan were air bursts, no fallout. The only maiming and killing from radiation was from "prompt radiation".
However, don't get the silly idea that the problem mentioned in the paper would cause any environmental disaster. The only thing that would happen would be the formation of a slow leak, and the reactor would have to be taken offline. No harm except to the stockholders and executives.
Get a grip, theree is no chance of any disaster with the problem mentioned in the article. Only a slow leak would form and the reactor would have to be taken offline for a head replacement (which is nothing new, they are expensive at $120 million+ but oh well.....)
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.
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.
Little Boy contained ~64kg of fissile material. reactors have more than that in one fuel rod
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
why would you be worried about a risk of an accident that basically can't happen
Or because 0% chance of accident requires complete control of design, manufacture, maintenance, operation and security. Since no one will pay millions then drop all control, thus your left with the only option of government taking over supervision of all these items, and thus the only one that can make the guarantee.
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.
Yeah, the greenies thought they could shut-down coal, etc like they had nuclear power and convert everything to green energy. Then Reagan got elected, ripped the solar panels off the White House and the Republicans have been able to use taxes as a kludge to prevent both Clinton and Obama from doing the necessary R&D with anything they deem inherently progressive.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
"If anything is active for thousands of years, it's easy enough to carefully scoop it up and bury it as nuclear waste."
Fine. Let's dig up the entire 20 mile zone around Fukushima and dump it somewhere. Oops, it's on an island. Oops, oops, part of the area is the ocean!
There was a story a couple of days ago about finding thyroid tumors in 30% of cases of children from Fukushima when there was none ten years previous and the researchers were trying to blow it off. The disaster was last year, sorry guys correlation does equal causation in this case.
Let's not forget the governments own report describing (criminal)negligence at many corporate and government levels. Kind of like here in the US with the Davis-Besse plant and it's not the only one and nuclear isn't the only industry with the problem(oil). Whenever humans are involved, cost cutting at the expense of safety is always a problem.
People keep comparing the deaths per capita from nuclear to things like car and plane accidents and especially other methods of power generation. I would suggest its NOT A USEFUL METRIC.
Our society has the means to absorb the geographically dispersed individual and and handfuls of people lost in car wrecks each day all over the place. Even the the total number is large, its dilute and the long term loss of economic resources such as land is minimal. The odd air craft accident that claims a few hundred is more painful but still manageable.
You saw the same argument made here with respect to the WTC.
Without any understanding of the social and economic impact of an event on that scale even on a city the size of New York.
... because clearly the expertise and care that should go into a nuclear reactor is at the same level of your local car shop.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I should clarify. Your car shop typically doesn't have all sorts of material-sciency ways to analyze for pending failures... such as x-rays searching for micro-cracks, pipe probes etc. If your car shop does that let me know, because they damn well would earn my business.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
If he really said that and I doubt he did, then he'd be wrong. There's no mechanism by which a failure at one plant can induce a failure at another. Even in the event that enough radiation was released to force people to abandon for a time a nearby second nuclear plant (old enough to require active cooling), the cooling systems could be left on. That is enough to prevent the failure from cascading.
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
One of my Simpsons favorite moments is the episode where Homer works from home, and just leaves a drinking bird to automatically hit 'Y' at every prompt of the power plant remote control terminal.
By the time you run out of places to put it, the first batch will be safe to dig up again. The Earth is a pretty big place, and the containers aren't all that big.
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
No, planes and cars create an ecological disaster in slow motion as part of their normal operation, along with coal plants which are estimated to kill or contribute to the deaths of 10,000-20,000 people yearly.
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
Greens have little power in the US
Greens shut down nuclear plants with lawsuits
Power. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yeah, but they also have a dramatically easier task, too.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Even today, the area immediately around the Chernobyl sarcophagus has 300 times the radiation level of Guarapari. Additionally, there's a difference between just living in a place and a variety of activities that a person may want to do in a place, such as farming, livestock-raising, drinking freshwater sourced in the area, and so forth which dramatically change the individual risk. Lastly, how do you know that the levels of radiation in Guarapari aren't causing ill effects? Because there've been quite a few studies into animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They're thriving in terms of numbers because nobody hunts them anymore, but there are significant adverse health effects observed in the populations.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The same reason they care about being indemnified from any risks. Less risk makes an investment much more worthwhile, and being indemnified at the level that they currently are makes multi-billion dollar investments much easier to choke down.
See, most of these guys/companies play stocks etc, and yes they may invest billions, but rarely more than a few hundred million in any particular company. Sinking billions upon billions into anything runs counter intuitive to them.
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.
Oh sure, if you do something stupid you can make a huge mess, but the *worst* mess of this kind in history wasn't as bad as some politician claimed this could be. The operators and engineering at Chernobyl where very stupid and the resulting mess was about as bad as I think this kind of thing can be but even that wasn't as bad as this claim. What you have is some politician trying to get votes, saying stupid stuff that is not really justified technically.
But my point here is that modern designs are much less likely to have issues like Fukushima because many of them do not require active cooling so we would be much better off safety wise to start building some of them. But even Fukushima., one of the worst examples of the worst kind of accident possible isn't nearly this bad. Of curse, there are risks, there are always risks, one just has to manage them.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
....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...
The engineers say there's little risk. The suits and general public that don't understand it need to be consoled some other way.
No sig for you!!
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.
Greens shut down nuclear plants with lawsuits
That's such a joke. I've got aging nuclear plants all around me here, and not a single damn one of them has ever been bothered in the slightest by "Greens". You're drinking somebody's kool-aid, my friend.
Read this and tell me how 40 years of continuous Green protests, which have achieved nothing, are going to shut down the poorly maintained, barely functional Yankee Vermont plant that every single sane human being in the state wants shut down. US greens are the definition of powerlessness; there's been more legislation influenced by looney anti-vaxxers for chrissakes.
I believe popular dissent, which admittedly was aroused by Green activists, preventing the building of one or two plants which were going to be built on fault lines or had other outrageous safety concerns. But are you going to pretend that this is a problem, and that we should knowingly build plants on major fault lines?
Environmentalists are the right-wing's favorite boogey man. Any time all the sane people in the whole country oppose some right-wing nutbaggery it's blamed on mythical environmentalist superpowers. It's totally laughable. US "greens" are close to powerless.
"Some politician." That's how you dismiss the prime minister of Japan, who flew in a helicopter over a nuclear plant while it was melting down to give courage to the men working there? I'm curious... what do you do for a living?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Oh yea! If flying over in a chopper makes you an expert then I got him beat!
I toured a nuclear power plant (from the ground) and actually got INSIDE the containment building to look down on the core inside the primary pressure vessel.... Before you call BS, it was under construction and didn't have fuel on site yet. But it was nearly finished and went into low power testing within about 3 months of the tour. I also got a quick tour of a research reactor and got to look down on the then critical core and saw the blue glow caused by the prompt neutrons slowing down. Oh.. And as a kid I toured an operational plant's visitor center..... Either way, I saw more than you see from a chopper.
Truth be told, all he could do was fly over and cheer on the folks who where risking their lives below. He was as powerless as I was to actually *do* something at the time, so I fail to see why it matters... Unless it really was just for political reasons?
I happen to be a software engineer right now, if that matters.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101