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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.
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.
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 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.
Dunno.. Sounds to me like that's more impressive than burning old plant and animal carcasses dug up from underground to boil water to make steam to make electricity.
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.
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
Not quite as impressive as using the gravatational force of the planet or tidal power tho.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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..."
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...
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?
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.
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.
Gravatational rotation of the planet = Tesla tower
Kinetic energy from the ocean waves = Salter's duck
Both would/could supply our energy needs but instead, our political process have been subverted by the nuclear lobby...
Jesus H. Christ, do you really think anyone would have gone through all the trouble of electrifying the entire world, laying all of that copper cabling when there was a plausible option for sending it wirelessly?!?!
Obligatory XKCD link. However, I must add, that I have walked through the halls of power, I know the people whom control the levers of society and they are all WAY to incompetent to pull off such a conspiracy.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
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.
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
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
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