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."

Comments

Re:Beyond comprehension

[fnj]

It's because government owns it, and government is building it. Government is concerned with one thing and one thing only: steering as much money as possible to their own pockets. They do it by cheaping out on critical safety valves.

I have to smile at how much more apropos that statement is if you s/government/corporation/g. Any corporation by its very raison d'être is like a corrupt government. At least with a government you get a chance.

Re:Isn't that the point of inspections?

[tao]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that you won't intend to ever flying on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, considering that they even had several issues that made it *past* testing? I seem to recall Airbus also having some issues. Furthermore I'm guessing you won't use any Apple, Dell, Sony, or Lenovo -- those are the ones I remember, I bet there are more -- laptops either. Their exploding batteries made it past testing.

All projects have issues. That's why you have reviews, testing, redesign, more reviews, more testing, and for anything that needs high reliability, lots and lots of fail-safes. For some products, where liability is low, companies don't care too much about this. Not so here though. The test process worked properly; the fact that the valves either weren't according to spec, or that the spec wasn't resilient enough, was identified. The problem will be fixed, things will be reviewed and tested again, against the new spec or component.

A nuclear power plant that gets delayed because of safety-related improvements feels a lot better than one that's finished on time. In one case you know that they at least took the safety issues seriously. In the other case you're left wondering whether everything was perfect to begin with, or if they just ignored possible issues.

Re:Hack piece

[AmiMoJo]

It shows that the engineers designing and building these reactors are still unable to correctly predict and specify the needed hardware for it to be safe. All the claims about such reactors being safe and it being impossible for them to fail catastrophically are therefore questionable, because even now they can't get it right and have to rely on checks catching these faults.

It's hardly the only screw-up either. The reactor vessel itself is compromised. It's probably fine, but the point is that the claims about safety don't match the reality.

On a related note.

[koan]

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-...