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Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades
gkndivebum writes "Southern California Edison has elected to decommission the San Onofre nuclear plant after a failed effort to upgrade the steam generation system. 'Nuclear economics' is the reason stated for the proposed decommissioning. Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities. Allowing the reactors to remain in 'safe storage' for a period of up to 60 years will allow for radioactive decay and lower radiation exposure for the workers performing the demolition."
Distance, Shielding, and Time.
Why not use all three?
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
weasels.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I have knowledge of this matter and I know it's crap. This is about negotiating with a supplier and throwing a tantrum. They have decided to cut off their nose to spite their face.
(If this sounds like a lot of opinion, it is...but I do have some knowledge on this matter. Once things are final, I'll be happy to share exactly what I know.)
For the moment, until things change, nuclear power is the only source that provides enough to keep things going without buring stuff and putting it into the air and everywhere. Already nuclear power has saved countless lives as they have safely displaced the amount of coal and gas to burn. Without nuclear power, the net carbon footprint of hybrid cars would be less than barely a net improvement over pure gasoline. Wind, solar, geothermal and others are not able to make it happen.
Anti-nuke people haven't been paying attention. But just about any way you look at it, nuclear wins. Sure it requires a great deal of care to handle it safely, but we've been doing nuclear in the US for a very long time with a pretty excellent record.
It disappoints me that greedy business interests are behaving this way. Until we have something better than nuclear, we need to keep nuclear going. (Shut them all down once we've got something better. It's not like I'm in love with the tech, but it's just so much better than burning stuff.)
Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities.
Yeah, my country unfortunately has a 60,000% idiot tax. We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food. We pollute so badly that we've managed to kill large lakes and entire biomes in Africa because we're burning fossil fuel as our primary energy source when we were the ones that first created nuclear power. 4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure". And we're reporting record numbers of people joining the Flat Earth Society, and have one of the lowest rates of acceptance in the theory of evolution of any industrialized country on Earth.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot... it's stupid, pathetic, moronic fear of technology, science, and progress. And it's killing the planet. Literally. We are literally dying of stupidity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
When Lucifer's Hammer hits, this beacon will help light up the dark for our children's children!
I thought the point of such extensive containment structures was that they would never be destroyed? Just remove the fuel and any equipment that isn't cemented into the structure and leave the rest. I imagine the general thought-lines behind a lot of nuclear plants was to simply to continue to build new reactors as the old ones had to be decommissioned and continue to use the same generators, transmission equipment & facilities with incremental upgrades over the years. But I think I see why they're going the decommissioning route with this one, even if it was economic to build some new reactors this plant is sandwiched between the Pacific and a major highway. The reactor structures themselves are not more than 400' from the ocean, at least on the face of it this place is another Fukushima under the wrong circumstances.
[Our Children's Children's Children Will Save Us]
From certain doom now. Just let them deal with it.
Both my aunt and neighbor told me the same crap when I asked why they don't recycle. They'll be dead before the world goes to hell.
I went through their trash and recycled for them. Each time I was scolded for going through their trash. I said I would stop...
However, to each I also told that research in neuroscience, cybernetics, and stem cells will give us the ability bring our dead back to life by scanning in their brain.
I promised that I would stop recycling for them, and also swore that if they do not start recycling that after they are dead,
I will have their bodies exhumed by whatever means necessary, and their brains scanned and I will bring them back to life
after the carelessness of people like them has caused the world they leach life from to truly "go to hell".
They both now have incentive to recycle, and have continued to do so; Even gotten some of their friends to recycle too.
These "God Fearing" people would throw the world away. It took someone putting the fear of life into them to change them.
Nuclear energy is most important. Once the last specs of coal and drops of oil are sucked from the Earth, we will look back at our fearful folly and think:
"All that useful material for making plastics and things, and the fools fucking burned it all."
It is time to realize the startling truth. You may literally have to live with the consequences of your actions forever.
There is no significant safety issue here
"i did not have sexual relations with monica lewinski"
I'm sure the Chinese would buy it
no doubt china already has a bunch of more modern remotely triggered nuclear devices on american soil... no need to buy something old and crappy
Nuclear proponents are always running around yelling wind and solar pawer can't compete on a per KW basis. Well, not if you skim off the profits and leave the cleanup to taxpayers!
Take the total lifetime cost ( including what is usually shifted onto us after the investors skeedaddle with the profits ) and divide that by KW's produced.
Hogwash! Nuclear power is too expensive to be sustainable.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I felt a vibration ah ah aah
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
As much as I love blasting on our danged ole federal gummint, on this one I have to blame the NIMBY asshats in Nevada. You see, the Feds identified a pretty damned good place in Yucca Mountain. The place is geologically pretty stable, made of solid rock, and has a crazy low water table. Oh, and it's about 100 miles away from civilization, which in this case means Las Vegas.
The feds spent decades fighting the locals to get this done, until Obama finally capitulated to the NIMBYs as fronted by Sen. Harry Reid, killing the project and leaving a total lack of long term storage. Quid pro quo for something, no doubt.
as if there were any other kind
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Great little story. :)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why not build a new Gen3 plant at the same site? Because we now know the site is seismically unsuitable. Otherwise it would have been a good idea.
There is a growing technical debt with nuclear decommissioning. Debts can turn into bubbles, I wonder if it is the case here. Do we really know how much power is needed to decommission a nuclear power plant? How many years of the plant's production is it worth?
Camped at San Onofre several times duing my early teens. Beautiful beach but the reactor was creepy.
-- Jimtown Kelly
You know, if you just enclose the water, it stops evaporating. Even if not "hot", swimming pools still need constant replenishment to maintain a set level. During summer, I lose somewhere about one inch a week if I don't cover my pool. Don't know how much if I keep it covered all the time, as we are often using it.
Learn to love Alaska
nah the hacking is just to provoke a reaction
I read that much of the dumping grounds repaired and sold the used appliances. The "trash" wasn't worth repairing at US prices, but at 3rd world labor prices, it was worth it. So your trash is getting repaired, your same toaster in the recycle is getting melted down, and some 3rd world person will go hungry. So, throw it away for humanity! Or something like that.
Learn to love Alaska
I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex. -Jack Handey
what they did was instead of replacing the steam generator piping according to original designs after decades of wear they hired a company to design a new system. The game as they manipulated the cost so it was just under the NRC trigger value which would have resulted in a NRC engineering review. And guess what, the design was flawed and the new pipes wore in just a few months. From what I read there was never any talk of going back to the original design but instead fought the NRC and local/State regulators to let them do patch fixes and run at a lower power level.
The really scary part is how they worked around the system to try and get changes made and then fought everyone calling them on the trickery. They should be taken over and shareholders given gov bonds in place of the stock instead of letting them continue running a public utility.
All hybrids should be plug-in hybrids, or they shouldn't be able to use the "hybrid" name, as you said, "hybrid" carries no useful meaning, other than offering a guess as to the fuel economy.
Learn to love Alaska
Thanks to fracking, natural gas is cheap, and unfortunately will probably remain so for a while. Yeah, it "only" emits about half as much CO2 as burning coal, which is like saying I'm "only" kicking you in the head once today, instead of twice.
You really have no clue, do you?
Decomissioning a nuclear plant isone of themost difficult technical undertakings andit is still unclear how to do it for large reactors. There is some experience with small ones, with the result that even long after stopping operation and removing the fuel, there is a lot of higky dangerous meterial left. Theother experience is that it costs someting like 100 times decomissioning a nuclearpower plant than it did cost building it. This is for small reactors, for large ons, it is likely more expensive.
And here is the real reason for the wait: They profited handily form operating these installations, but only because they did not build adequate reserves for decomissioning. If they let themcool for 60 years, all these criminals will be long gone and cannot be held accoutable anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Once the last specs of coal and drops of oil are sucked from the Earth, we will look back at our fearful folly and think: "All that useful material for making plastics and things, and the fools fucking burned it all."
I used to worry about that too, but you can harvest the CO2 back out of the atmosphere, it's just more expensive. So they'll still shake their heads at us, but it won't be disastrous.
Also, your recycling story is hilarious.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What does that have to do with the safety of the decommissioned reactor?
it's not the devil you know that i worry about... it's the devil that springs out of left field that leaves everyone either dead or gobsmacked and thinking "fucking jesus why didn't we think of that"
surprises like this happen all the time, and in some cases they are a nuisance or they may hurt or kill someone... however when it comes to nuclear technology fuck ups could kill thousands of people and devastate a large area for thousands of years. there is absolutely no room for bullshit "there is no significant safety issues here" complacency around anything to do with nuclear technology. morons like you are the cause of workplace accidents everywhere... and society doesn't need your kind anywhere near nuclear reactors, decommissioned or otherwise.
There is starting to be a market for nuclear cleanup. Just think how many companies out there are researching, or have a product that helps to mitigate oil spills? People dump millions of barrels of oil into the ocean then go out and try to clean it up.. we're still using it though, even though it's really nasty and really hard to clean.
The same can be said of nuclear waste. If they start handing out multi-billion dollar contracts to clean things up then shit will get cleaned up. Impractical methods of removing nuclear contaminants from soil and other material already exist, but nobody can afford to use them on a massive scale. Not to mention they would be a huge waste of energy.
I guess what I'm saying is that I understand their wanting to hold for now. Just letting things decay naturally saves tons of work and increases the safety. It also allows time for scientific or engineering work that may make the job easier.
what makes you think the reactor is de-fueled yet? there's your first fuck up right there
The free market won't solve anything because there is no free market.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yes but why the hell did we make so many fission reactors when we could have made LFTRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor Cleaner, Cheaper, Safer and can be safely decommissioned in a couple of years rather than the best part of a century.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
What the fuck are you talking about? It is not unclear how to decommission a reactor. You drain and treat the water and chemically shock the fuck out of the system to cause crud bursts and try to flush out hot spots. You put in temporary shielding. You cut out the hot spots and send them to be buried. Anything that passes a gamma scan is recycled. The reactor vessel itself is disassembled (core internals and core barrel) and then it is removed and buried (and filled with cement for shielding). You decontaminate the containment as well as you can and then demolish it and bury it in a landfill (the parts that pass a gamma scan). The secondary and electrical systems are disassembled conventionally, and the auxiliary building is disassembled, decontaminated, and gamma scanned.
Stop talking out of your ass. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You are trying to say that it costs ten times more to decommission one nuclear plant than it is going to cost to decontaminate the Hanford nuclear weapons reservation. Do you really think it will cost $0.5 - $1 trillion per plant? Feel free to provide one fucking citation to this little factoid that you just pulled out of your ass.
If you have to wait some 40-60 years for the iodine and some of the cesium and strontium to decay, it means that:
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Call me a cynical dirty hippy, but I have a problem imagining the directors of a commercial nuclear power station handing out a multi-billion dollar contract to clean things up 40 years after they're retired.
Or do you mean the government, payed by the taxpayer, hands out that multi-billion dollar clean-up contract? I agree, good for the economy 40 years onwards, but it's a bit of a broken-windows fallacy. If they hadn't dug up the uranium and built the reactor they wouldn't have to clean it up afterwards either.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Well, since you seem to be the expert here, tell us if the steel in the reinforced concrete of the containment dome is especially depleted from element 27 (name not mentioned to not give people ideas). That's why you mention the gamma scan, amirite? *if* it got activated it has a half-life of 5 years but its a strong gamma emitter according to the wiki page. I once worked at a hospital where they replaced their source. It was an complicated, carefully orchestrated procedure with police protection IIRC.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
you missed the bit about the heat exchanger. my god, you think all nuclear plants release radioactive steam as a matter of design? that perhaps radioactive water can transfer it's heat to clean running water without touching or mixing with it?
how do you get all that from the link you posted?
- it's also fission.
- it's somewhat safer, but all next-gen designs are somewhat safer
- decommissioning will be much the same as the same thing is going on in there.
- it has the inherent (and hard to "design out") ability to produce pure (like 100%) U233, which is a tremendous proliferation hazard.
i still think they're a good idea, but i just don't like magical utopian thinking or misinformation.
People will recycle more when Recycling collection comes 1/week and Garbage collection comes 1/month. I can't speak for the entire US, but in the past 4 cities I have lived in, the calendar looked like this:
City 1 - Recycling program? What recycling program?? ('Merrica!)
City 2- Garbage 1/week, recycling 1/month. A large
City 3- Garbage 1/week, recycling 2/month. A 60-gallon bin, with wheels, machine-emptyable was provided.
City 4- Garbage 1/week, recycling 2/month. At first, an 18 gallon bin was provided. Later, it was changed to the 60-gallon bins.
The problem for us is that we were (and still are) filling up the 60 gallon recycle bin before the end of week 1. For a while we stockpiled the excess materials, hoping next week would have less volume and we could "catch up". It never did. The pickup truck refuses to handle anything that is not in the bin. I don't have the storage capacity to have 2 recycling bins, and even if I did, I'm not going to pay extra or it. Nor am I going to waste my time schlepping all of it to a transfer station (and burning $5 in gasoline to get there). I even tried doing the "garbage bin shuffle" and putting recyclables in my neighbors bins, but they are almost always full too. And I live in a condo community mostly filled with old people.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The containment dome is never irradiated; the reactor pressure vessel is bombarded with radiation and neutrons but it's made from steel over a foot thick and that stops any particles or gamma radiation getting out to affect the primary containment. A regular part of a refuelling and inspection operation involves technicians entering the containment volume next to the reactor vessel to check for damage, leaks etc. and to replace instruments and do other remedial work before the reactor is restarted.
And guess what? The reactor vessel is made from a steel alloy with as little "element 27" as possible, to prevent neutron activation of the regular isotope you're so scared to mention into its more dangerous cousin. It's almost like, you know, the people designing nuclear reactors had figured this problem out for themselves, oh, half a century ago.
and devastate a large area for thousands of years.
Okay fudmaster ... lets be realistic for a change ... worse than any nuclear power plant accident would be a nuclear bomb detonation ... and even that did not do any real damage that will last 'thousands of year'.
This isn't the fallout video game .. we know now that nuclear events don't do damage for nearly as long as silly nutjob statements like yours.
Get a clue.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Just my thoughts. There are countless examples of this happening. In a sense, TEPCO being now state-owned is just the same: Privatize the earnings, but if something goes really wrong or becomes really expensive, just foldand let the taxpayer deal with it. Despicable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Mybe read up on it? There is one large decomissioning project currenly runningn (former) easter germany. That they need to do _research_ there, and this is just a simple russian-build design in the lower power ranges.
Of corse, people like you that want to believe their fantasies willneverbother to actually look at facts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
you'd have to build everything in fricking space before they would be happy.
Not when they start thinking about the ground stations. Nobody wants to be near one of those.
Just run power cables down the space elevators. Totally supersedes the need for beamed power deathrays.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The free market will solve our garbage problems.
What the actual fuck?
It's a sunk cost, we have enough uranium already mined to cover things for a good long time.
OTOH, the damage is ongoing for the alternative power sources.
Mind you, all of the above are less harmful than coal power.
Don't know where you heard that because i used to do the PC work for the county, which is pretty typical in this area (and from what I was told pretty typical for the entire south) and all they ever did was reclaim the freon and take the copper out of fridges, that's it. I personally saw countless PCs, TVs, pretty much every appliance you could name just thrown in the truck and hauled off to the landfill.
So not only do you have all that which can be reclaimed but as I said they are already testing a variable microwave that will break down plastics back into oil...you got ANY idea how much plastic is in your average dump? But I can tell you they didn't even bother trying to sort out cans, when you are running the biggest landfill in an area you got waaay too much to process to stop and sort. All those landfills are gonna be gold mines in 50 years, just you watch.which is why I always laugh when people bitch and whine about recycling because all that money is gonna end up giving the poor states a hell of an economy boost for several decades.
Hell think about it man, ALL of those metals are finite resources, can't magically mine forever, so like peak oil there WILL come a time when it will cost more to dig than it will to recycle, again the only question is when. The nice thing about those landfills? They ain't going anywhere, not like there is a time limit and if they don't dig it out all those metals and plastic will turn to poo, so even if it takes 50 years so what? It will still end up making the poor states a hell of a lot of money in the end.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
but, but,.... it's a WHOLE LOT of smug.
Seriously, there is a problem in that a lot of waste is dumped into the ocean, effectively distributing it widely and making that ultimate recycle way harder. Landfills make more sense, but we have a lot of ocean-front cities. All that ocean. So tempting. So free.
Unit 3 was reportedly defueled back in September. Not sure about unit 2, which was initially shut down for refueling when this whole thing started.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You have a plant that has land, cooling, transmission towers, generators, loads of 'spent fuel' and 2 reactors that kind of sux.
Do not get rid of the plant. Get rid of the reactors.
Instead, replace those with thorium reactors, OR GE-PRISM and make use of all that is useful there. While those are working, then pull down the old generators.
With this approach, it keeps electricity, makes it cheaper, deals with 95% of the spent fuel, and provides a profit to the company while they tear down old gen II reactors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
what makes you think i was talking about a nuclear detonation?
get a clue
That is false. The site is a long ways away from a dead fault.
Regardless, if they use say B&W mPower reactors, or GE-PRISM, or one of the thorium reactors, all are designed to be built in a factory and transported. They will be able to withstand any earthquake, as long as it does not actually shear the reactor. In addition, these would not have an issue with happened in Japan. All of these can handle outages.
The point is, that it makes GREAT sense to bring in new smaller reactors that will burn up the old fuel, while tearing down the old reactors.
Note, that with approach, SONGS probably has over 1000 tonnes of 'spent fuel'. That would take a number of train trips and a lot of waste. OTOH, if burned up, it would leave less than 50 tonnes, which would be taken out in a just a few train trips, and the TRUE waste, would then need less than 200 years, rather than 20,000 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
just because accidents don't always happen doesn't mean they can't
it's also funny how when people read "kill thousands of people" and "nuclear plant" in the same sentence they most likely think i'm referring to some kind of nuclear explosion... these are the people that haven't been in nuclear construction
i could walk into any family home and identify a ream of hazards... i could fill a large book with hazards at a decommissioned nuclear plant, with a decent chapter on radiation
there are plenty of idiots working in all sorts of dangerous environments, and some are never involved in or cause any accidents... this also doesn't mean they can't or won't, or that there are any fewer idiots
dumb luck has no doubt saved large portions of humanity on more than one occasion
Some years ago I stumbled across a list of corporations that owned (as in owns the land rights, not the facility that runs the site) landfills. 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) had the largest holdings and the top 80% of the list were all mining corporations.
so yeah, when raw resources are all too expensive to mine, the mining corps will just move their extraction operations to landfills.
All the cooling and none of the radioactive discharge.
Learn to love Alaska
Well then, I suppose it wouldn't matter that even one fuel rod generates magnitudes more energy and heat than an engine.
With a small air heat exchanger (air being a poor medium), and the average engine being in the 100kW range, scaling it up is easy. "Magnitudes more energy and heat" in a spent rod means you are either lying, stupid, or they should be putting spent rods in sealed loop cooling pools, and using the waste heat to power a 1 MW power plant. Ha ha. 1MW from a spent rod.
Again, you are missing the basics. You are using a water to air heat exchanger in the open-pool design you mention, it's just powered through evaporative cooling to heat the air, not conduction, as in a car's radiator.
Learn to love Alaska
Also consider the long. long list of unsolved problems and disadvantages.
It is not clear that a practical LFTRS power plant can even be built. No breeder reactor has yet proven itself able to deliver reliable electricity for example, and several of these have actually been constructed.
The poster certainly cannot defend the claim that they will be cheaper using actual data.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Settle the fuck down. The fuel is removed, and everything that remains on site would not be classified as high level waste..
Except for the part about "Tons of highly radioactive fuel now stored in pools will have to cool before the rods can be moved to concrete pads outdoors. ... An estimated 3 million pounds of spent fuel at San Onofre is so radioactive that no repository exists that can handle it, meaning it will have to remain in concrete casks on the coast for decades, if not indefinitely." as explained in the link in the post.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I don't want to be anywhere near those anchors... Think what happens when the cable snaps and the tether tries to wrap itself around the planet.
" Here is a surprise for you: when a reactor is defueled, the containment is often left open to the outside environment"
Well that's not a great idea since insects, birds etc can fly in and out and get contaminated. And since 1 microgram of plutonium if inhaled is fatal, that's a genuine health hazard.
Are you talking about San Onofre here? I live within tens of miles of it. The fuel is currently NOT removed. In fact there are 4 decades worth of spent fuel sitting in pools at the site. And it will remain there indefinitely until we figure out another place to store it OR pull our heads out of our asses and reprocess and recycle this fuel. Letting such a valuable commodity sit there is just silly.
Even though I live nearby the thing I am disappointed they are giving up on it. Looks like we're in for another summer of rolling blackouts in SoCal.
The radiator in the car requires a pump and, of course, a radiator. I think evaporative cooling (the current method) is the best way to go. If you seal it and pump it you must have the pump working and airflow over the radiator at all times. It is more complicated.
...only once the rods of cooled sufficiently (a few years). Until then they must stay in the pools.