Slashdot Mirror
US Nuclear Industry Plans "Rescue Wagon" To Avert Meltdowns
Hugh Pickens writes writes "AP reports that if disaster strikes a US nuclear power plant, the utility industry wants the ability to fly in heavy-duty equipment from regional hubs to stricken reactors to avert a meltdown providing another layer of defense in case a Fukushima-style disaster destroys a nuclear plant's multiple backup systems. 'It became very clear in Japan that utilities became quickly overwhelmed,' says Joe Pollock, vice president for nuclear operations at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group that is spearheading the effort. US nuclear plants already have backup safety systems and are supposed to withstand the worst possible disasters in their regions, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. But planners can be wrong. The industry plan, called FLEX, is the nuclear industry's method for meeting new US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules that will force 65 plants in the US to get extra emergency equipment on site and store it protectively. The FLEX program is supposed to help nuclear plants handle the biggest disasters. Under the plan, plant operators can summon help from the regional centers in Memphis and Phoenix. In addition to having several duplicate sets of plant emergency gear, industry officials say the centers will likely have heavier equipment that could include an emergency generator large enough to power a plant's emergency cooling systems, equipment to treat cooling water and extra radiation protection gear for workers. Federal regulators must still decide whether to approve the plans submitted by individual plants. 'They need to show us not just that they have the pump, but that they've done all the appropriate designing and engineering so that they have a hookup for that pump,' says NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said. 'They're not going to be trying to figure out, "Where are we going to plug this thing in?"'"
Don't build them in areas subject to storms, earthquakes, etc., and don't cut corners on the design, construction, maintenance, and inspections in order to save costs.
I happen to think that nuclear power is a good idea, but if our species isn't mature enough to do the above, we've got no business using it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This scenario evokes International Rescue. Obviously that says I'm old.
This plan sounds good, and might actually be well planned. But only for a few years.
Then, plants will start using the existence of the backup capabilities as excuses not to build their own. And it will all be perfectly legal, as subtle rule changes are introduced with little public knowledge. You can already see the seeds of this in TFA:
The NRC staff said the industry initiative, called FLEX, may satisfy the proposed order to mitigate certain safety challenges.
The fox runs the nuclear hen house in the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been captured by industry.
Still, any plan is better than no plan. The length of time power was out and systems were down due to Hurricane Sandy should indicate just how long such emergency systems have to be prepared to operate. Multiple weeks of fuel must be kept on hand. Alternate water supplies must be identified.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ok so in cali we have a couple plants. Lets say "the big one" hit and takes cali down. The plant fails and needs this crew for help...oh wait no airports are open because they are all too damaged....what now?
... "rescue wagon" is jus a PC way of saying "gigantic nuclear crash cart", I take it?
They have a way with words.
not a bad idea overall. Probably be cheaper and more efficient than mandating each site has backups for the backups for the backups for the....
It could be a huge example of fraud and abuse though. store/buy old worn out shit repainted to appear new at new prices.
Hell the National Guard does this already just in case they need a few M16s in front of the local walmart. Be a good idea to combine these stores with air national guard sites for quick deployment.
...to run all this wonderful equipment. You can stabilize fuel, of course, but not forever. Eventually, you'll have to change it out, and dispose of the old stuff.
Quite frankly, old nuclear power plants that don't use passive safety systems and depend on grid electricity are an accident waiting to happen. A far better idea would be to design and build new plants
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
New Madrid fault, anyone?
It is great that the industry is finally doing something. To be honest, I am amazed that FEMA did little about that in the past. However, that is not the real issue.
We are working with reactors that actually expired long ago. These should be taken down AND REPLACED. Not with coal, or Nat Gas, etc. but with a SAFE reactor that can burn up most of the current spent fuel.
GE's PRISMs could do this, but even better would be thorium reactors. It would be in the West's as well as America's and the nuke industry to spend some money helping local companies get their thorium reactor designs tested and passed. These have ZERO chance of a meltdown (unless you can avoid the laws of physics or the NRC allows piss-poor designs). Likewise, these can be factory built which will make them a great deal safer AND CHEAPER than the build-on-site monsters. Note that by using the 'waste' that is on-site, it would be possible to lower the amount of real waste. And with much smaller amounts that need to be discarded 100 years out, well, this becomes today's issue that solves itself down the road.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's not "roadside assistance" it's a "Rescue Wagon"!
Anyone else think there's time to re-act, re-locate, re-spond with their Emergency Erector Set? Chernobyl anyone?
They need to be located near a large river or lake, too
An onsite generator is not passive safety.
Yucca scrapped, no new contenders to my knowledge for centralized waste storage...
This is a huge problem in spent pools nationwide.
Speaking of which... what's keeping us from launching that crap into the sun?
And don't tell me it's cost - money isn't everything, especially when talking about compounds that have the potential to literally foul the planet for centuries.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Is it really so difficult for the USA to implement when it's been used successfully for decades in several other countries?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In the case of a Fukishima type nuclear emergency, the US military already has the most of the equipment need for a quick response such as generators, armoured vehicles, radiation monitors, airlift etc. Under 18 U.S.C. 831, the Attorney General may request that the Secretary of Defense provide emergency assistance if civilian law enforcement is inadequate to address certain types of threats involving the release of nuclear materials. Such assistance may be by any personnel under the authority of the Department of Defense, provided such assistance does not adversely affect U.S. military preparedness.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
20 years ago, Ed Teller was a speaker at an Engineers Week banquet. He suggested instead of a few large nuclear plants with all complexities of sheer size plus containment vessel and security, make many smaller plants that are more manageable. I wish this was taped, I took some notes and published in one of local engineering society newsletters (did best I could capturing Teller's actual phrases). Seems to be a reasonable idea, a friend who was in Navy sub service said there are about 30 different emergency procedures (or steps?) on dealing with reactor problems. He feels large commercial plants are so complex, certain situations which can overwhelm operators. Of course there are many issues when dealing with lots of small nuclear power plants. I'm just throwing out some things I've heard.
Regarding a "rescue wagon" which I don't think will be practical. Unlike other disaster response plans (i.e. for various natural disasters), events of large scale nuclear disasters are very few in between. Having an effective team with resources will continually on "high state of combat readiness" will be very taxing with highly trained crews waiting years for The Big One. Perhaps if going with large nuclear plants, put in extra protection i.e. backup systems. Yes, these backup systems cost additional money but far cheaper than cost of the disaster itself if it were to occur. And some of these "once in 10,000 years events" do actually happen in your lifetime.
mfwright@batnet.com
Folks,
I'd like to introduce you to "Extreme Damage Mitigating Guidelines" (EDMG), which are procedures created in response to NRC Security Order Section B.5.b. That order was created after 9/11/2001, when crashing airliners into important structures became a known tactic.
The industry response to the B.5.b requirements is not unlike what you would expect for Fukashima contingencies (you've lost large portions of your plant to widespread fires and destruction. How can you mitigate the release of radionuclides to the public when areas x,y and z of your plant are heavily damaged?)
A certain local nuclear power plant I'm familiar with has a diesel-powered pump stored onsite but far away from the power block. It's the exact same type of pump that would have saved the plants at Fukushima, and because of 9/11, we already had the pump, hoses, flanges, and connections required to inject cooling water into the reactor or steam generators under the most adverse conditions. This equipment and the required contigencies plans were in place a few years before Fukushima.
Now the post-Fukushima problem is a natural disaster could conceivably wipe out this B5B pump, putting this contingency plan at risk.
That, presumably, is where this FLEX equipment comes in.
If you can't count on ANYTHING onsite being available, then you need to have it stored safely offsite. If you're going to do that, might as well share the equipment and costs.
One might argue about the size of the regions where this equipment is shared, but the FLEX equipment is:
a backup plan (FLEX)
to a backup plan (EDMG per B5B)
to a backup plan (Severe accident mitigating guidelines and backup pumps and backup- backup generators that pre-date 9/11)
to a backup plan (original emergency diesel generators and emergency operating procedures that have been at the plants from the start.)
Japan did not develop EDMG's after 9/11, and consequently were far behind the US nuclear industry in terms of emergency preparedness.
Now, the NRC has required a number of changes at existing and planned US nuclear facilities in response to the Fukushima meltdowns, however, that builds upon changes already made in response to the B5b regulations that came about a decade ago.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Where did you get hold of this classified Soviet technology?
Perhaps a Welcome Wagon would make more sense, as in "Let's build some modern nuke plants".
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
isn't it time we switched to reactor designs that are inherently safe, don't require redundant backup cooling systems?
"Eventually, you'll have to change it out, and dispose of the old stuff."
No problem. Use the diesel to fuel plant vehicles in order to rotate the stock. Fuel sampling is old news. Military POL troops handle stuff like that under austere conditions worldwide.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
How about risk, as your rocket may fail to achieve orbit.
Of course, cost is also realistic consideration, talk of "launching something into the sun" is made by people who don't understand orbital mechanics. The large delta-V for even reaching mercury is fearsome for a half ton object like the MESSENGER probe. we don't have the rockets to send 80,000 tons of nuclear fuel to the sun, nor the trillions of dollars to build such a fleet.
But the truth is our "spent fuel" is actually usable fuel, a gold mine of energy that can release seven or more times that which we've extracted so far, and at the end would leave only isotopes with very short decay time. we should not dispose of it but burn it in modern reactor designs.
How about risk, as your rocket may fail to achieve orbit.
THAT is the legitimate problem I was looking for.
talk of "launching something into the sun" is made by people who don't understand orbital mechanics.
Which is probably a majority of the human population. No sense getting a big head about it if you do.
Most people don't understand how automatic transmissions work, either, but you don't see me rubbing it in.
But the truth is our "spent fuel" is actually usable fuel, a gold mine of energy that can release seven or more times that which we've extracted so far, and at the end would leave only isotopes with very short decay time. we should not dispose of it but burn it in modern reactor designs.
Fair enough; so long as there's some solution other than the current "let's bury it somewhere and hope for the best" strategy.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And don't tell me it's cost - money isn't everything, especially when talking about compounds that have the potential to literally foul the planet for centuries.
That's mostly myth. There's very, very little in spent fuel, or any sort of transportable nuclear waste, that's all that dangerous long-term - and nothing should be transported or disturbed more than necessary for the first 5 years after use. (Despite this being very easy to get right, sure enough we've got it wrong before; go figure).
Most radioactive compounds aren't subtle: if they have a short half-life, you really don't want to be in line-of-sight for 10 half-lives, but after that they're just industrial waste. Not pleasant, but not bad on the scale of industrial waste and there's not much of it. There are some nasty compounds that are only mildly radioactive, but deadly if they enter the food chain, but then that's not specific to nuclear waste at all. The screw-up is to try to put hot waste in barrells or some other silliness while it's still hot, and will destroy the structural integrity of containers. Leave it on-site for 5 years or so, however, and it's not hot anymore.
We want to keep spend fuel around long-term because it's valuable, not because it's so dangerous.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The majority of the human population that doesn't understand how automatic transmissions work also don't suggest using them as the solution to some problem they are completely unsuited for. And for those that do you should point out that they don't understand the workings and if you are being really nice a quick reason why it won't work.
You know exactly what was done when "launch it into the sun" was suggested as a solution.
Or do you prefer people just nod their heads and never mention when you display a lack of knowledge of some specialised area of knowledge?
You could always try explaining it, instead of being an uppity dick.
Of course, to do so would require you to actually know about orbital mechanics yourself, a caveat I had not considered up until now...
IMO, people who use phrases like "Well, that's just because you're ignorant of/don't understand X," without going on to show their own understanding of the subject, are full of it. Otherwise, they'd prove their own knowledge, wouldn't they?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
For example a micro-gram of plutonium is a toxic dose for a human in the body, how long before it decays to its daughter product. You and I both know that is a long time.
There's plenty of nasty shit in industrial waste (sometimes literally so), but the plutonium you're likely to find in a reactor cleans itself up pretty quickly, with a half-life of 75 days. Rememberthat "leave it alone for 5 years" I was talking about? Math is your friend.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.