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Under Revised Quake Estimates, Dozens of Nuclear Reactors Face Problems
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Owners of at least two dozen nuclear reactors across the United States, including the operator of Indian Point 2, in Buchanan, N.Y., have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they cannot show that their reactors would withstand the most severe earthquake that revised estimates say they might face, according to industry experts. As a result, the reactors' owners will be required to undertake extensive analyses of their structures and components. Those are generally sturdier than assumed in licensing documents, but owners of some plants may be forced to make physical changes, and are likely to spend about $5 million each just for the analysis."
Given that these "revised" estimates are generated by the same people who want to extinguish all dependable, tried and true sources of energy, one must reasonably suspect that the estimates were "revised" in a way that would help ensure the dismantling of the nuclear industry.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/... Sad.
If, going forward all the plants were of an identical design...wouldn't that make things a bit simpler? Right now it seems the goal is to keep these ancient dinasaur reactors running (which does make short-term economic sense...). But wouldn't a more "monolithic", unified set design standard cut costs and ensure things were safer?
Been there, done that... http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/bulletins/1979/bl79001b.html
At the end of the lifespan, somebody who is not that architect says we can't afford to replace a (still perfectly good) piece of infrastructure. Let's agree that if we (inspect more often/inspect in greater detail/upgrade this piece here), we can get (10/20/30) more years of life out of it. Y'know, I can already hear the original architect screaming "That isn't what I said!".
So now it's forty years later, and something the original architect may not even have seen coming turns Fukushima into a radioactive hotspot - or the bridge in Skagit County collapses - or an 8.5 magnitude earthquake levels the building, killing hundreds. The problem is that it's one thing to spend millions of dollars to have the object in question. Once people are used to it "just being there", nobody wants to spend even more just to keep it. They'd rather spend just a few dollars more and convince themselves that it's better than ever. Good on us for being so clever!
Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant closed because of this situation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
That's not how engineering works, or why Fukushima went into meltdown.
Engineers specify the lifetime for the various parts of their design. They specify under what conditions they are considered worn out and cannot be used any more. Clearly if any worn out part can be replaced then there is no limit to the lifetime of the design. In practice this has proven to be true with things like aircraft and ships, and indeed nuclear plants. What kills them is when the cost of maintenance gets too high and building a new one is cheaper.
In the case of Fukushima age had nothing to do with it. The problem was damage from the earthquake, damage from the tsunami (and the lack of upgrades that TEPCO were told they needed to do to the sea defence wall), and confusion in the following days. The plant itself was actually better than new, in that it had been upgraded over the years and all parts were properly maintained and functioning as designed. It was just an old design, although it is debatable how much better newer designs would have fared in the same situation.
Age isn't the problem, bad design is. Fukushima was broken from day one, in fact it was even more vulnerable to major earthquakes than it was the day one hit it all those years later.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No sorry. The architect says this xxxxxx will stand for xxxxxx years with xxxxx specific maintenance.
Company runs xxxxx for the xxxxx years and then calls 3rd party inspectors to endorse xxxxxx for yyyyyy number of years based on yyyyy maintenance.
Providing you perform yyyyy maintenance and seek re-endorsement periodically you can continue ad-infinitum.
Most industrial plants have a design life of around 10 years. Most will happily run for 60 years providing you replace bits that have corroded, monitor corrosion, inspect them inside and out periodically. Most fatal industrial accidents happen from either poor design, or lack of inspection. Running things for too long doesn't come into the equation.
The damage to the Fukishima reactors weren't directly the result of the earthquake, but the tidal wave that followed. Then again, I question building reactors on the eastern seaboard of Japan in a region called "The rim of fire".
Fear a quake which topples an already damaged building with nuclear waste storage stored on top.
Last I look, Japan is the place for such things.
It's hard to hear news of how slowly this nightmare is being managed - I would suggest internationally criminal, or nearly so unless it is close to complete.
Perhaps the UN should do something truly world significant and direct immediate action to this problem at the level in needs, before we all regret it's slowness.
What? Are you not able to get cancer from those macro-particles of death (as reactive as lead) released into the upper atmos. when the outer casings burn in open air, as all the water is gone and building derby and the truly deadly blaze will make it unstoppable..
But you go ahead and rest easy.. I'm sure the Japanese government has it completely under control.
Move along! Nothing to see here.
Lessons from Fukushima may keep two thirds of Japan's nuclear plants closed. http://www.reuters.com/article... It could most nuclear power is a bad risk and should be written off.
Fukushima is not a hot spot. There is a lot of media surrounding it and sure, there may be some "bad things" there but there isn't life threatening Chernobyl-level activity (and even Chernobyl wasn't all that bad). I also wouldn't be concerned about Buchanan, NY getting hit by a tsunami, Long Island and NYC are among a few of the things that have to be passed by (and those would dissipate most/all of the energy). And if a tsunami hit there, well, then, we'd have more serious things to be concerned about like your survival among the remaining 10% of the species on earth.
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THe problem is in the US all of these nuclear plants are really old in time, and in technology. I think we need nuclear power, but we need to be replacing these old plants with newer designs that take into what we have learned and leverage newer technology. We should two or three generations farther along with this tech than we are.
Time persistent infrastructure, at least on time scales beyond several decades, is across the board too costly for current implementations. The irony being, that's exactly why we should be building them. Not because it's too costly, but because we should be looking at infrastructure on terms of centuries. Yes, we do have the technology to do this, however we, society, neither have the will nor gumption to think on implementing at those scales. Socially, we as humans, aren't there yet for that kind of engineering implementation. It would require wholesale re-evaluation of economics, social policy, property rights, and terms like democracy, social responsibility. In short, I'm almost certain I won't see it in my lifetime. I'm 35, and expect to live to at least into my 80's if not 90's, even after the longevity that my family genetics provides. Barring of course, 'accident'. Nevertheless, human society writ large, isn't ready to rethink on scales beyond a few decades. There's too much social, econimic, and political chaos for the kind of stability required to think even consider building at such lengths.
There are ALWAYS fundamental parts of the structure and inaccessible elements (pipes routing through masses of concrete or running under foundations for instance which are simply impractical to ever replace. In the case of nuclear power plants these things include highly critical parts like steel pressure vessels (which are degraded by neutron capture reactions amongst other things). You may be able to INSPECT these things, but once you deem that they've worn out its just game over, you decommission.
Another aspect of this problem is that it isn't simple to inspect things either. In many cases it can simply be impossible and the things that are hardest to inspect are also likely to be the things that can't be replaced. What ends up happening is that someone makes a model and says "this aught to last 20 years" and 19 years later another guy gets paid by the owner to make a new model that says "this aught to last 40 years". Now, the new model should be realistic, but it may be far less conservative and as we know models aren't perfect.
For this reason the really prudent thing to do is stick with the initial estimates, they're probably the most conservative, and decommission when the design lifetime is reached. Its LIKELY to be a bit conservative but as one poster stated above its all about risk vs reward. Nothing is totally safe or sure, but the longer you run an old nuclear reactor the more likely it is that components will be weakened and compromised. You just never know what sort of unforeseen event is going to then put stress on things. A pipe that was 200% stronger than necessary when it was made and is still 140% stronger than necessary is still now too weak to withstand 180% of its original maximum load. That might be "Never supposed to happen" but a 36 meter tsunami wasn't either. Shit happens.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
You may not be concerned about a tsunami at Buchanan, NY, but did you know that it was on an earthquake fault? And yes, there was an earthquake on that fault line not so many years ago. The fact that it's within 50 miles of all of NYC shouldn't be of any concern, as it would be easy to move millions of people in case of emergency. I remember when they used to say they'd evacuate the mental patients nearby via train...of course, after an earthquake, not all the rails may be useable. As for bridges and tunnels, who knows? Good thing Manhattan is an island. Perhaps it could be evacuated by boat or by swimming.
Seriously, they would be better off with new reactors that can be built in a factory, installed quickly, can up their current stash of waste, and is much cheaper than dealing with these old unique reactors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We don't look in a crystal ball and say "this will last 40 years". We look at expected modes of failure and estimate operational conditions, do a bit of statistics and then have some confidence that it will last 40 years.
Then reality asserts itself.
Years later people can come along and know the operational conditions instead of estimating them, look at expected modes of failure, examine parts prone to those failures, do a bit of statistics and then have some confidence that it will last another X years.
It goes under various names and "remaining life calculation" is one of them. I used to do that for a living, oddly enough using some techniques taught to me by some nuclear guys (for remaining life estimates of high temperature, high pressure pipework), until using a lot of computers for that sort of stuff shifted me into the field of just using lots of computers in general.
Anyway, my point is that an expected design life is not hard and fast. If actual work is put in you can get a better estimate later. If blind hope is all you have then you are better off sticking to the original estimate - but these nuclear guys are depending on non-destructive testing and not blind hope.
The official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission reveals the collusion that took place with the regulator so improvements would not be put in place. This happened because the beleif system in the safety of Nuclear Power affected all of the safety proposals put forward within and by TEPCO. In other words a 'systemic' issue where the belief that a reactor is safe to be run to capacity, as opposed to a safety culture that certifies it to do so, is the main issue.
A good example of this safety culture is in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report. Their interactions with the US Nuclear Sub Fleet revealed that a sub has to consistantly re-certified to operate a certain depth. If it does not get recertified it may not operate at that depth.
As the issue at Fukushima was controlling the residual thermal energy in the reactor as it cooled, perhaps this is a safety culture that could be applied to individual Nuclear reactors at power plant installations where the operating procedures recognises the issues and only certified the reactor to a certain percentage of its production until the problems had been resolved.
Any recertification the following year with new lessons learned proscribes risk aversity proportional to the impact, the onus being on the owner to prove that the reactor is safe to operate to that capacity.
The goal is to prevent an accident because there is less thermal heat in the reactor to deal with and explosions, such as those seen at Chernobyl and Fukushima, don't happen. The best outcome being an operator may have been able to continue using a reactor because they chose to be risk averse appropriately to avoid any possibility of the type of thermal issues that lead to explosions.
I know that such a proposal would not be popular with the pro or anti nuclear people, however there are another group that recognises that these plants are getting old and simply can't be run forever so if you want the benefit of the power you have to figure how how to do that safely.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
We need a bit more R&D before we get a reactor that worth mass producing. Why plan to build 100 of design X over thirty years when design Y developed only five years later shows far more promise before the first of design X is even operating? Then there's the monoculture problem that hit French reactors a couple of times where they all had to be shut down at once to fix design faults, so some sort of middle ground makes sense.
Of course nuclear lobby groups killed off civilian nuclear R&D because it was a treat to their investment in existing designs and the threat of a different fuel shortening the commercial life of their current plants (a shift to thorium and new plants running it had the potential to prevent the old plants competing and the entrenched nuclear lobby didn't like that).
Maybe in a few years we can buy reactors from India where they still carry out civilian nuclear R&D and do not have that paticular political roadblock. In the meantime startups from former military technology doing an end run around the entrenched nuclear lobby (or enforcing laws against bribery) are what I see as the only hopes in that area.
Yep, Indian Point is less than a mile from a faultline.
One that's barely been active over the last 200 million years.
Risk assessment figured that there's a 100% chance of critical damage to the reactor vessels...over a timeline of 100-150 THOUSAND YEARS.
Seeing as the plant's lifespan is supposed to be between 40 and 80 years and the plant is rated to withstand a 6.1 scale quake, you have a better chance of dying in a traffic accident IN YOUR LIVING ROOM.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
and they still have the replaced parts of that bridge in Skagit County at pre interstate standards they should of build a new one with room for 3 lanes each way + full shoulders. Or at least build a new 3 lane one way with full shoulders and keep the old one in place as 3 lanes one way + shoulder.
Get leukemia and die you piece of arbitrary shit. Chernobyl was bad, atmospheric testing was bad, nuclear war or even a terrorist dirty bomb can be BAD.
The US nuke designs are very weak when compared to the French. The French containment buildings are incredibly strong concrete and steel domes, built on top of huge shock absorbers.
Penny wise, pound foolish...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
100% of US nuclear reactors have a spent fuel problem: there is nowhere to dispose of it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They used the same excuse to close Yucca Mountain.
> although it is debatable how much better newer designs would have fared in the same situation.
Which designs? Some of them can't meltdown because there simply isn't enough material.
As we know now, even without the tsunami Fukushima would be a large nuclear disaster, since at least one reactor is cracked and leaking contaminated radioactive water into the ground water table. Also, that "freak tsunami" actually is statistically happening every thousand years or so, so the chance that it would happen in the life time of a facility, say 50 years, is about 5% or to put that in perspective: "so likely that you'd have to be an idiot not to design for it". So much for a perfect design, but that's not what I wanted to comment about.
Fukushima is an example of how big humans tend to mess up "perfect" designs, plans and safety regulations. The amount of failures, attempts at cover ups, corruption and other human behaviour that has lead to the giant mess Fukushima is currently is evidence that humans are incapable of safely operating even the most safe design of nuclear reactor. Almost all nuclear accidents we've had in the past 100 years were caused by human action, not by design flaws. Until we've designed a better human that doesn't have these flaws, we will have risks operating nuclear facilities.
Whether that is a reason not to go nuclear is a matter of debate, but don't assume that designing safer facilities will help a lot in preventing accidents from happening. Sooner or later some idiot will do something stupid, most likely a group of idiots will do multiple stupid things and we'll have another incident to deal with. Right now we have a fire in a storage facility that couldn't have happened if multiple safety regulations weren't violated, but it happened anyway. The more safe you build something, the more careless people are going to be. Who would have thought that they would simply shut off fire alarms and automatic extinguishing equipment? Who would have thought they would run old unmaintained trucks that could spontaneously burst into flames inside a confined space like a salt mine filled with highly dangerous plutonium? People do that sort of incredibly stupid things because they are humans. Even fully automating the place isn't going to work, since the automated stuff still needs maintenance and sooner or later, humans will be involved and mess it up.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
...that nuclear power is the most dangerous of all power sources, and will kill us all if we don't shut it down permanently.
Surely these should be DOOM estimates?
The architect says this (bridge/power plant/building) will stand for (20/30/40) years with proper maintenance. Then, we should outright replace it. We know it'll cost x dollars now, plus y dollars of the life of the item. Sounds good, so we buy in.
At the end of the lifespan, somebody who is not that architect says we can't afford to replace a (still perfectly good) piece of infrastructure. Let's agree that if we (inspect more often/inspect in greater detail/upgrade this piece here), we can get (10/20/30) more years of life out of it. Y'know, I can already hear the original architect screaming "That isn't what I said!".
The original architect necessarily has to be very conservative in his estimates because he has, in your example, 20-40 years of future uncertainty messing up his predictions. He cannot actually know how high the humidity will be, how much the ambient temperature will fluctuate, how much the soil will shift, what sorts of loads the facility will come under, etc., except as some form of probability distribution. And this distribution becomes more uncertain the further into the future he tries to plan it.
After the 20, 30 or 40 years have actually passed however we know all these things, or can find them out, pretty exactly. And if life has fared gentler with the facility than the architect's worst fears accounted for then there may still be decades of useful life left in it. In this case it is perfectly sensible to make a new maintenance plan and life estimate for it, and then take it from there.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Age isn't the problem, bad design is. Fukushima was broken from day one, in fact it was even more vulnerable to major earthquakes than it was the day one hit it all those years later.
FTFY: Fukushima was broken from day one against the size of the tsunami it went up against. If the tsunami had been smaller it would not have been problem.
Fukushima was fine for the assumptions they made. It was even fine for the earthquake itself.
It's just that they made a bad assumption on the waves it should be able to handle.
Risk assessment figured that there's a 100% chance of critical damage to the reactor vessels...over a timeline of 100-150 THOUSAND YEARS.
No. Over a timeline of 0-150,000 years. We don't know how to predict quakes on long-quiescent faults yet. We're barely able to do it on active ones.
Seeing as the plant's lifespan is supposed to be between 40 and 80 years and the plant is rated to withstand a 6.1 scale quake, you have a better chance of dying in a traffic accident IN YOUR LIVING ROOM.
You know, this isn't just about my life. This is about all living things for hundreds of years after an incident. Maybe you could expand your world view to include things past your nose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nice of you to chime in to "correct" me, but it's may be worth looking at a bit of the history of nuclear power plants first before going on about weird stuff like "approval time". There are many physical reasons why construction of large projects such as these take a very long time even given a design, funding and a decision to go ahead - close to ten years for a thermal power station of any kind. Also you seem to have missed the point that we do not have any generation four reactors actually built so the first few are going to give us some ideas about how to make some improvements.
I get that a software perspective gives the idea that you can just go ahead and sort out the design flaws later but physical engineering projects rarely have that sort of flexability. The idea is generally to make the mistakes in a prototype instead of building a huge number of lemons (or your suggestion of committing to a long series of possible lemons before the first one has been built).
This Quake centrism pisses me utterly up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's right, continue to strangle the goose that laid the golden egg.
Nuclear power in the USA is already beyond too expensive and all the anti nuclear pundits are hell bent on burdening the industry with evermore cumbersome regulation.
Prove the risk exist, beyond any reasonable doubt.
Without lots and lots of new nuclear power, the world is doomed to the worst of climate change. Germany's renewable energy plan has only showed us that there are serious limits to how much a country can replace nuclear and fossil fuels with solar and wind.
I'm not a fan of current pressurized water reactors, but they are better than any other energy source available right now, except for hydro, geothermal and biomass. Instead of making current nuclear operators life a living hell, why isn't the atomic scientists pushing for public funding of revolutionary new reactors that will be far safer and should be far cheaper than current nuclear, molten salt reactors ?
Is it justified to force the industry to prevent accidents that never, ever happened ?
This sounds like a fundamentalist ideal, no risk is ever acceptable article.
First get rid of all coal and most of natural gas utilization in the world, then prove we can get rid of nuclear as well.
But the actual plan seems to be coal is more acceptable than nuclear, which is downright "looney tunes" stupidity.