Slashdot Mirror
Inspectors Warn Faulty Valves In New-Generation EPR Nuclear Reactor Pose Meltdown Risk
Bruce66423 writes: Valves for the new generation of French reactors being built now have raised substantial safety concerns on top of the existing issues about the quality of the steel used for the containment vessel. Similar to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, France’s nuclear safety watchdog found “multiple” malfunctioning valves in the Flamanville EPR that could cause its meltdown. The Telegraph reports: "The watchdog reportedly cited 'multiple failure modes' that could have 'grave consequences' on the safety relief valves, which play a key role in regulating pressure in the reactor. Owned by state-controlled French utilities giant EDF, Flamanville lies close to the British Channel Islands and about 150 miles from the southern English coast. Designed to be the safest reactors in the world and among the most energy-efficient, the €9 billion (£6.5 billion) EPR has suffered huge delays in models under construction in France, Finland and China. It is now due to enter service in 2017, five years later than originally planned."
Half-Life 3 confirmed!
Putting their faulty nuke reactors as close as posible to England. Merde!
Valves don't cause meltdowns. Multiple faulty valves could inhibit the mitigation of an even that could lead to a meltdown.
In this case, valves did not pass the required tests so they can't be used in the plant when it is built. The testing process is there for a purpose.
They're verifying everything works as it should. If the valves have a problem it's good that the problem is identified and fixed.
A reactor that costs $10.1 billion, and the fucking critical coolant valves don't fucking work when brand fucking new? WTF????? How is it possible for the design process of a doom machine to be that lackadaisical? Consider; this is after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Flames are licking out of my head; smoke is curling up. If you gotta mark me flamebait, I almost understand it. But you gotta ask yourself: if anybody is less than filled with rage at this shit, are they really paying attention to Stuff That Matters?
What is the importance of being 5 years late?
Costs Of Nuclear Power Plants - What Went Wrong?
See that "Preview" button?
While this is certainly a serious design issue, there is no immediate threat: the reactor where the issue was detected is being built, and is not yet loaded with fissile material.
It's also rather misleading to claim that the EPR is intended to be the "safest reactors in the world".
Probabilistic risk analysis shows that the "large release frequency" (i.e. major radioactive material release) is 100x higher (1.8e-7 per reactor-year) than for the directly competing design of the ESBWR (1.4e-9 per reactor year)
The article is from the British newspaper The Telegraph so it is directed at a British audience.
The slashdot summary ISN'T from a British newspaper so that particular bit of information is irrelevant here. The entire quote is not required. Bad valves are a potential problem is news. The fact that it is some arbitrary distance from Britain isn't of particular consequence to all but perhaps a handful of slashdot readers and I'm pretty sure the ones that would care are pretty well aware that France is pretty close to England.
Mr. Burns payed off the people so things will not get or the guy in 7G get canned as he can't even remember his name.
I'm pretty sure Gordon Freeman wasn't aware of that....
No worries!
Absolutely nothing will be done.
Move along citizen, nothing to see here :D
Penises. Nuclear reactors. Spaceships. Mars condos. Wow.
So large! Very powerful! Much wow!
Mod parent up! http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html has actual insight/facts in a debate dominated by BS from both sides. It's neither pro nor con, just factual data.
five years later than originally planned
Better late than unsafe.
How does this Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen reaction work?
You've got to be foolish to believe this. Because we're going to need batteries the size of mountains to stabilise the supply / demand of power from solar and wind alone. We require a more stable solution we can fire up or shut down at any given moment. You can't ask the national grid to hang on for the next breath of wind, or the sun to poke out from behind the cloud, especially at night!
As much as I agree that Nukes are not a good solution, and the risks far out-weigh the benefits, I also accept that we have to look for much better solutions that work with tidal power perhaps, or a safer reaction (if it's ever developed) such as Thorium. I suspect the energy companies already have much better solutions available, but have no interest in bringing them online until they're forced to. That, or the military are forced to shake their tree, and see what falls out. I'm sure their black budget billions have turned up some awesome alternatives and advancements.
This is disgusting and everything possible should be done to - short of marginally increasing my electric bill or tax bill of course!
he can't even remember his name.
Tibor?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Joke F Lübbecke of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and 3 scientists from the GEOMAR Research Center for Marine Geosciences poured tracer dye into coastal waters off of Fukushima, and monitored its progress as it traveled to the West Coast of North America, to find out what might really happen.
They have revealed their results in a new paper published by journal Environmental Research Letters.
The paper shows that the West Coast of North American could end up with 10 times more radioactive cesium 137 than the coastal waters off of Japan itself.
That could decimate sea life in the area, in fact one group suggest the sea life die offs seen on the West Coast could be because of Fukushima, if true how much rain water could be contaminated?
http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
http://enenews.com/scientists-...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
A constant problem that occurred in nuclear power plant building in the USA was that the various regulatory agencies changed requirements on the fly.
Suppose the spec for an certain overflow valve was "close in 1.25 or less seconds with 50 ftlbs torque". SO the builder overdesigns and puts in a valve that closes in 1.2 sec with 40 ftlbs torque. They tend to over design when building nukes.
Sometime after the valve is welded in, ( and plants takes many years to build) the regulatory agency decides that the valve should "close in 1.5 seconds or less with 35 ftlbs torque."
Does the existing valve meet the specs? Maybe. We allow slower closing, but at lower torque. Maybe not. We have to cut it out for re-certification, or maybe buy a new one to meet the new specs.
I made up the numbers, but the example is real.
So, what happens next?
News flash! Nuclear power plant under construction has valves that don't meet specs! Meltdown inevitable! Three mile island! Hiroshima!
Nuclear winter!
So I have to wonder what is the back story on this. What are the actual numbers?
Which dumped their nuclear waste directly in the channel.
Renewables are definitely going to be a significant part of our energy portfolio in the future, but unless some amazing electrical storage technology is invented they're only going to be part. Nuclear (preferably) & fossil fuels are still going to have to provide a hefty part of the baseload. Nuclear has gotten a bad rap over the years, you can probably count the yearly fatality rate even including radiation induced cancers and sub industries with your fingers. If you want to count the number of people killed building/maintaining/supplying other power generation systems break out some spreadsheets, a calculator and a pot of coffee.
Lets be real here. The Chinese, German, Indian, Canadian, US, Russian, English, and Japanese have many, many reactors on their subs and ships. There are no disasters happening on a daily basis like the press says with power reactors, and the reactors in ships also have to be engineered to move and handle G shock due to conditions of war.
Problem is that Big Oil/Big Coal waged a highly successful campaign against it. Carter's knee-jerk permanent moratorium on power reactor construction after 3MI has cost the US dearly, and ensured the country will be married to fossil fuel for a long time to come. The fact that people run scared when they hear the word "nuclear" is proof that the anti-nuke propaganda campaign worked.
I remember in college a few year ago, there was work being done on a reactor in south Texas. The person there was using a TIG welder in an enclosed space in an admin building, and expired. The press called it a "nuclear accident, putting most of Texas at risk" and other scaremongering.
Of course, when you look at the deaths per terawatt-hour, it shows how dangerous nuclear energy really is.
The takeaway? We have some damn good propaganda machines that can pull the wool over the world's eyes for generations, making people eschew a carbon-neutral, high density method of energy generation for ones that cause massive climate change, cause wars, and keep the quality of life low globally.
Sounds like an engineering problem, not directly regulatory. Engineering specs components to meet some system requirements. In this cas, shutting off some flow with a maximum of X liters passed through. Downstream systems are designed to allow for the X amount. If a regulator steps in to micro-manage valve specifications at this level of detail, they had better take responsibility for the overall system design and possible subsequent failures.
Now, if the regulators came in and asked to see the enginering calculations that determined the system to be safe with amount X passed through and those were in error, the spec gets changed. And engineering heads will roll if the blame cannot be assigned to some other party. So, point the finger at the regulators. They are insulated from reprisals by engineering/construction management.
The problem with tis project is that; at the top, the owner, engineering and construction firm and inspectors all report to the same 'management'. The French government.
Have gnu, will travel.
So long and thanks for all the fish?
You think the US intelligence budget is being used to research clean energy technologies. You need to post here more often. Do you have any thoughts on the global financial system?
We'll ignore the NIMBY huge issue of what the hell we do with the long-lived wastes; this is in France. In the US, with the GOP and the libertarians wanting ever-less regulation, I say, with a 99.44% confidence, that the private sector will cut corners as far as they can go, and with a nuclear plant, the results are far more widespread and longer lasting than other power plants.
So, who here actually lives near a nuclear plant?
mark
I don't know what you imagine this valve does, but the performance and state of "downstream systems" is of little to no importance.
EDF didn't design, and isn't building this power plant.
This valve is safety-critical, and may present an even greater risk than the vessel problem, because for many PWR's a medium-sized leak poses greater challenges to the engineered safety features than a large leak.
Nom de Dieu! I thought that the French had their nuclear reactors down to a fine art. Zut alors!
Well, back to ze old drawing board, ne?
I don't know what you imagine this valve does,
Different discussion. Read the parent post.
EDF didn't design, and isn't building this power plant.
Areva is the engineering/construction firm. Areva is, like EDF and the regulators, owned by the French government.
Have gnu, will travel.
The underlying report on the vessel's excessive carbon content stated that initial testing showed a reduction in its excepted resiliency to 40% substandard, enough for the chief of French nuclear supervisory authority to deem it as "grave or [potentially] very grave" fabrication defect.
It also mentioned that all of this was in part due to Areva deciding to skip on full quality control on one of the reactor's most important components. The same steel foundry also cast the two vessels that were used in both Chinese EPRs, btw.
Areva also measured the carbon content of a central core sample taken from this vessel head, which revealed a higher than expected carbon content (0.30% as opposed to a target value of 0.22%)."
From the report on the French regulator's own website: http://www.french-nuclear-safe...
Nuke plant specs are written in conjunction with the regulators and signed off before construction begins in the USA.
before the existing round of building (Ga Power's new plant), regulators could make changes at any time and did after construction.
Under the new rules that is not allowed.
Also, I read some more about the plant in France, and I got a better understanding of the problem than given by the breathless Telegraph.co.uk article.
The valves failed to close completely while being tested. No one wrote a spec that said "valves with usually almost close a lot o the time, maybe", so my suspicion is wrong.
This one looks like bad manufacturing that caught in testing.
That's why we test, and it got caught, and that is still a bad thing, but a Chernobyl didn't almost happen.
Seriously, France knows how to produce reactors correctly. The only way for them to be screwing this up, is if they outsourced this. And if they sent this to China, well, China has reasons for wanting weak reactors in the west.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Gads, between the far right's rejection of science about AGW, and now the far lefts rejection of good nuclear reactors, the world has become a crazy place.
Look, EPR is probably not the best reactor, however, the most likely issue is that France has outsourced parts of this. I am guessing that they have outsourced these parts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Have a look at Isentropic Pumped Heat Energy Storage. Not as compact as batteries but no geographic dependency like CAES.
...and how it can solve all our problems...