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Training Under Way For New Nuclear Plant Operators In S. Carolina
"Start thinking about getting your tinfoil hat radiation hardened," writes an anonymous reader, and excerpts thus from ABC News: "Southern Co. in Georgia and SCANA Corp. in South Carolina are the first to prepare new workers to run a recently approved reactor design never before built in the United States. Training like it will be repeated over the decades-long lifetime of those plants and at other new ones that may share the technology in years to come. Both power companies are building pairs of Westinghouse Electric Corp. AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle near Augusta and SCANA Corp.'s Summer Nuclear Station northwest of Columbia, S.C. While the nuclear industry had earlier proposed a larger building campaign, low natural gas prices coupled with uncertainty after last year's disaster at a Japanese nuclear plant have scaled back those ambitions." Getting a new nuclear plant approved is a long haul.
South Carolina has the largest number of nuclear facilities and radioactive waste in the USA.
Washington DC has the largest number of lawyers.
South Carolina won the toss and had first choice.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
The reactors them selves are chernobyl biscuis (/sarcasm).
http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/ Commonly known as a pressurized water reactor (PWR).
The only thing revolutionary is the control systems. Its more digitized and automated then ever before. Personally I don't like this, not very warm and fuzzy about the US nuclear commission and the state of the industry. I would like to see other designs implemented.
Boeing built a plant in N. Charleston, SC for the 787 Dreamliner seeking wages and right to work status (not to mention tax incentives). The Dreamliner has suffered from delays and electrical failure, engine and cooling problems.
It's the first "3rd generation" reactor design to be approved, and is supposed to have much better passive-safety features than previous generations. For example, in a reactor scram, the core would be cooled by a gravity-driven cooling system that works without power.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...and we just hope that there is no coolant leak. I suppose that is better than hoping there is no leak and hoping the cooling system remains powered, but really we need systems with better passive safety before we build more nuclear reactors.
Palm trees and 8
On top of the digital controls, it has vastly simpler mechanical and electrical design, yielding significant reductions in the amounts of safety-related piping, cabling, valves, seismic building volume, etc.
Something that should be appreciated, but is seldom mentioned: the design work has been conducted using modern computers and software incorporating vastly improved analytical methods for nuclear, thermal, mechanical, civil, and electrical analysis. The last round of plants built in the US were designed in the 60s and 70s using tools that seem positively ancient by today's standards.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
AP-1000's use a natural circulation cooling feature in such an event to keep cooling flow through the core and breach.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How about just being reasonable. The 787 is having the same sorts of problems that every new plane gets.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
To be fair, it was only three years from submission to approval and publishing in the register, not bad really. But then Westinghouse submitted several revisions over the succeeding years, triggering more reviews and approvals.
The South Carolina plant has nothing to do with the delays or other problems, having only opened last year. Boeing only delivered the first SC-built 787 a couple months ago, and no special problems have been found. Manufacture of components is around the world, final assembly was exclusively in unionized Washington for the first Dreamliners. That's the source of the issues you mentioned, including delays due to a union strike in Washington.
The problem the unions have with the SC plant is that they won't get their member dues and commensurate increased political power.
I'm with you on that. Thorium really seems to be the way to go. Safer, simpler, more plentiful, not as prone to "nuclear proliferation" (i.e., fuel for warheads), more useful byproducts, and much less waste product.
I should add that we have had experimental thorium reactors here in the U.S. in the past, and we learned at lot. And India has approved the build of a thorium reactor for electricity generation.