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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.
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.
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
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.
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
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."
That's why I'm terrified of nuclear families.
I'm not sure what your point is.
I really wonder who thinks the comparison between a huge chunk of steel reinforced concrete and the corrosive environment of a nuclear reactor is somehow insightful.
Ultimately, a dam's lifespan is determined by the build up of silt behind it.
The Hoover dam will be put to rest when either the silt builds up high enough or
the cost to maintain it is higher than the cost to remove it. Whichever comes first.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.