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First New US Nuclear Reactor In Two Decades Gets Permission To Begin Fueling (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar nuclear power plant began construction in 1973. The plant's first reactor was completed in 1996, and it began operation. Work on the second reactor paused in 1988, and only resumed in 2007. That reactor is now complete — the first newly-operational Generation II reactor since the 1990s. The new reactor has been granted an operational license, and it will soon begin fueling. While the Gen II reactors aren't unsafe, they're much less safe than the Gen III AP1000s. "Compared to a Westinghouse Gen II PWR, the AP1000 contains 50 percent fewer safety-related valves, 35 percent fewer pumps, 80 percent less safety-related piping, 85 percent less control cabling, and 45 percent less seismic building volume. ... If an accident happens, the AP1000 will shut itself down without needing any human intervention (or even electrical power) within the first 72 hours."
Have you ever visited a construction site after construction was stopped for any significant amount of time?
I've been to a couple of commercial construction sites (ie, mostly steel and concrete, versus wood for residential) where construction had stalled for a couple of years after the property value collapse, and crews were literally having to break-up concrete because unfinished exposed rebar ends had rusted and that rust expanded the rebar down into the concrete, causing cracks to begin in that concrete.
That was after only a couple of years. Imagine how bad it would get after close to 30 years. Buildings already have enough problems when they're finished if they don't get regular maintenance over the course of decades, but unfinished buildings that are not environmentally sealed will undoubtedly fare far, far worse.
I know that nuclear reactors are supposed to be structurally overengineered simply due to the nature the forces they contain, but starting out with a handicap due to building structural problems doesn't sound like the greatest plan, and that's before account for all of the other technical changes that have been engineered through the decades. We've already seen problems in younger reactors that were finished approximately on their original timetables, this seems like it's asking for more.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I am. I have a job as an engineer in the military industrial complex. I've also been told to drop what I'm doing because of $BULLSHIT_ADMINISTRATIVE_REASON only to have to pick it up again a year or more later and waste time getting myself and the right people back on track. I've also seen my colleagues do the same, and I've seen all of get screwed by the fact that after $WAITING_PERIOD, the resources we had marshalled the first time around aren't quite so easy to marshal the second time around, especially when you pull the rug out from under people enough times, they don't want to work for/with you the next time when for real, I swear, we have the funding to finish it, promise. If it's true for the 10M programs I've worked on, it's true times a hundred for a billion-dollar power plant.