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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."
Hooray for scaremongery!
Only in America.
This country is so f*cked it's not even funny. What a pathetic joke.
This is what the stupid scaremongering of the media, some politicians and many environmentalists ends up causing: instead of building Gen III or even Gen IV plants, we're finishing ancient Gen II plants because that's all that's been approved, decades ago. They are quite literally the cause for nuclear energy's relative safety concerns.
If the government could make its mind up and stop wasting time, the US could rapidly diminish and even eliminate its reliance on fossil fuels without even having to suffer through energy shortages. Allow breeder reactors on top and you'd also eliminate the whole nuclear waste scare while being that much more efficient and cost-effective.
If an accident happens, the AP1000 will shut itself down without needing any human intervention (or even electrical power) within the first 72 hours."
I imagine that means the plant could be completely inactive (decay heat will be down to the point of not requiring active cooling) within three days, but as written it's not reassuring.
And while "Generation II" sounds good, so were Fukushima and Three Mile Island. We should be building Gen 3-4 by now.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
My car has two doors, does that make it less safe then a car with 4 doors?
Prattling off percentages like that doesn't give any indication of the context behind them. '50% less safety valves' for example. What does this mean? Are the 'less valves' perhaps more robust? Does it mean less work in an emergency to shut everything down?
This article makes me think of clients that demand a certain number of lines of code.
Run for the hills!
The article goes on for quite a bit about how much less "safety related hardware" newer plant designs have but I highly doubt that that says anything about how safe a reactor is or not. What DOES make a difference is fail safes, regular inspections, backups, emergency response plans, all with a design double checked by someone with a high school level of common sense. What has caused most of the major nuclear disasters? Rank stupidity. Fukushima was caused by the idiotic placement of backup generators and associated control hardware, in a basement and the subsequent failure of plant operators to call for necessary resources. Chernobyl was caused by them futzing with the reactor outside of normal operating procedures and then activating an emergency system that was not designed to handle those modifications. Three Mile Island was caused by a lack of appropriate sensors to recognize a lack of coolant in the reactor caused by a faulty relief valve. Knowing the reactor coolant level/pressure/temperature with certainty, having the ability to shutdown the reaction, and the ability to keep the reactor cool are the only things you need to prevent 99% of nuclear disasters. I'm not saying that designing a nuclear plant is easy, but keeping your backup cooling systems above water, not experimenting with a full sized nuclear reactor & knowing if your coolant is pouring out of a relief valve would seem to be no brainers that shouldn't have been missed.
And now, with electrolytes!
You are welcome on my lawn.
. . . instead of whiny political propaganda?
Yeah, let's see how far you get with that.
The other way around. Simpler is more reliable. Suppose that each year, 1 door of 1,000 fails. Your car has two doors, so the odds you'll have a door failure are 2/1000, or 1/500. My car has four doors, so the odds that one of mine will fail is 4/1,000, or 1/250.
It may be easier to see with more extreme numbers. Your car engine probably didn't fail this year. Dallas Texas has a couple million car engines. It's virtually certain that some failed.
More parts means more chances for failure. Perhaps more importantly, it means more connections and interactions between parts. More interactions means more opportunities for things to go wrong. To expand on that a bit more, more complex systems are also more difficult for engineers to fully understand, so not only are there more opportunities for the same types of failures, there's also a much higher likelihood of a potential failure scenario that wasn't predicted.
All in all, a fork is much more reliable than a computer, because simpler things with fewer parts are more reliable in many ways.
* Obviously -redundant- parts can make things more reliable, but both designs have redundancy built-in.
Here are full details, with appropriate references, about the idea ending the reliance on fossil fuels in the US requires nuclear to be a significant part of the energy mix:
https://docs.google.com/docume...
The summary is that solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal can make an important contribution, providing a significant portion of our energy needs. A very significant portion cannot be solved by those four choices - for reliable, steady power in huge amounts the choices are fossil fuels or nuclear.
I see no reason not to replace older model plants with modern reactors.
I currently live in the respiratory evacuation zone of a nuclear power plant that is literally 1 month younger than I am.
It's been refurbished with parts from 3 mile island.
Officially, they are planning on building 2 more reactors at the site both AP1000.
However, the approval process was halted in 2013.
If I'm going to live near a nuclear power plant, please build a modern reactor so, one day you can retire the original reactor instead of trying to extend it's operational lifespan beyond it's designed life span.
Forward unto dawn!
Hip Hip Hooray!
As I understand it the US has about 18GW of solar PV installed capacity with about a 28% capacity factor - so roughly 5 GW of actual power generation.
These two reactors together will generate about 2.2GW with a 90% factor, or around 2 GW.
One power plant, 40% of the capacity of all PV in the country.
I think that no new nuclear reactors have been built in the United States, because no one wants a beta gen III+ nuclear reactor. In the West, there were 3 different nuclear reactors, Areva's EPR reactor, Westinghouse's AP1000 reactor, and GE's ESBWR reactor. GE decided to exit the nuclear reactor business. Several AP1000s, and EPRs have been under construction in Europe and China since the late 2000s. The EPR reactor in Finland is considered a screw up, and is getting major design changes. China hasn't been reporting many problems. Maybe China is better at building stuff, they haven't found the problems, or the problems have been kept secret. The UK thinks China is better at building stuff. None of the EPR, or AP1000 reactors has started commercial electricity generation, so the waiting game is a smart one for now.
Hiss...
I had said "the odds you'll have a door fail". You gave the odds that you'll either have A door fail, or have TWO doors fail. :)
That's actually my favorite question in probability:
You enter two contests. You have a 1/10 chanfe of winning each contest. What is your overall chance of winning?
It sounds so simple, yet it's devilishly difficult to figure out if you don't already know the trick, that you have to instead figure out the overall odds of LOSING both.
"Compared to a Westinghouse Gen II PWR, the AP1000 contains 50 percent fewer safety-related blah, 35 percent fewer blah, 80 percent less safety-related blah, 85 percent less control blah, and 45 percent less seismic blah.
So if I get the math right, it sounds like it's 45% less earthquake resistant, 85% less under control, and ... carry the 1, 130-165% less safe all around. This makes me kind of nervous. But we got the facts -- at least that they're not spinning it to try to make the situation sound better than it is.
The capital costs of a reactor build are high because it's an expensive piece of construction, not simply because of delays etc. Every other large project including coal-fired and natural-gas generating plants also have to spend money up front preparing plans, covering the likely environmental impacts and dealing with protests.
Nearly all modern-build Gen-IIa and Gen-III reactors like the AP-1400, the EPR, ESBWR etc. are significantly larger than the original Gen-1 and Gen-II designs, each generating well over 1GW of electricity (the EPRs when they are complete will produce 1.6GW). That takes a lot of concrete and steel for containment, bigger turbine-generator sets, a larger reactor vessel etc. Putting that all together takes longer to complete even if everything goes right first time -- the Chinese are turning out their enhanced Gen-II APR-1000s in about 6 years from breaking ground to first grid connection but they've got a tested production line in place for groundworks, components and construction.
The good long-term news is that new-build Gen-IIIs will operate for more than 60 years; the Russians just produced a reactor vessel that they claim will last in service for a century and more. This improves the financial viability of a reactor project even though they cost a chunk of money up front.
That was the regulatory regime beforehand, and it resulted in the most colossal waste of money ever: Shoreham
The combined (construction & operating) license regulatory regime is intended specifically to prevent such wasteful endevours, The design, construction, and operation of the facility is approved largely upfront to ensure the plant can actually be operated when it's built.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
When the shit hits the fan, I want a nuclear reactor to shut down RIGHT NOW, not at a lazy pace of "within 72 hours."
That seems ridiculously unsafe to me. Earthquakes don't take 72 hours to do damage. They take seconds. I don't see why a safety system should wait up to 72 hours to shut down what amounts to a controlled nuclear bomb.
Argument? Still? Are you almost done arguing yet? Coal produces far more radiation than nuclear and far more CO2 than anything. Everybody pretty much agrees coal is the worst choice. So long as we continue arguing about how to stop using coal, we're largely stuck with coal until we decide. We've known this for a few decades, so I'd say it's about time we stop arguing and start doing the things we all know are better. Let me know when you're done with your mental masturbation and ready to get busy.
What would it take to used Cesium 137 (my understanding is that it is a byproduct of uranium fission) as fuel in a reactor given it's toxicity?
Perhaps you didn't note the asterisk in my post. Yes, redundant identical parts often increase overall system reliability (though they create new modes of failure - ie load balancers can have problems).
As I said the reactor designs BOTH incorporate redundancy, so that doesn't account for the difference in parts count. The newer design is truly _simpler_ with fewer interactions that can go wrong.
AH, the smell of nuke shill memes in the morning. Smells like... horse manure.
BECAUSE EVIL HIPPIES CONTROL THE WORLD. I'm sure none of this has anything to do with actual facts, such as the fact that privately owned fission power plants are only profitable with massive taxpayer subsidies, and this plant's construction was idled while those subsidies were unavailable. The Cheney/Obama regime has got the fattest subsidies ever - not just the renewal of Price-Anderson, but actual per-kilowatt subsidies paid for with tax dollars.
For the last fourteen years, anybody who wanted to could get approval to build a Gen III plant. But that's not what your heroic Ayn Rand worshipping paragons of power production have been doing - instead, they are relicensing obsolete plants that are decades past their projected lifetime, with the clear intention of running them until they Fukushima, and they are hurrying to recover costs they sunk in the 1980s trying to build more Gen II plants. There will be no improved nuke plants if Wall Street has any say in the matter; they've had 14 years to build one already, and they aren't doing it.
As Hanover Fiste would say, "Ah, GIVE ME A BREAK!" Put down the Ann Coulter books and back away from the Rush Limbaugh show, OK? Read some real data and get informed. Hippies and environmentalists are the least effective political group to ever exist in the United States. They have less power than the embittered old men of the John Birch Society. Here in reality, nuclear power wasn't being built in the USA because it isn't cost effective under a free market capitalist economic system. You need a socialist system to make it work, as countries in Northern and Western Europe have demonstrated. The Cheney energy policy provides the funds by subverting the will of the US public (who are mostly against nuclear power) and forcing them to provide profits to the nuclear industry.
Absolutely true. If we'd spent one-quarter of the money we've spent propping up petro-dictatorships over the last 20 years on creating a truly distributed, agriculturally based methane production and distribution system instead (we've already got the main pipelines down both coasts, and the power plants themselves) we'd already be completely off fossil fuels and we'd have full employment with the cheapest energy prices you've ever seen in your lifetime.
But stupid nuke and petroleum shills won't let that happen, because apparently they want a centralized power production system that can't be reliably protected from natural disasters or acts of war, instead of a robust and reliable decentralized infrastructure that would shift economic power away from the hereditary 1% brown-energy aristocracy of the USA.
Dicks.
So why does it take so effing long to approve this? What if the delays are engineered, no pun intended, to make the reactor obsolete before it ever gets brought online?
Actually, no China isn't putting a crapton of resources into LFTR. It's actually putting about a hundred billion bucks into building a lot of PWRs with more to come in the next ten years or so if they continue the way they're going. Chinese researchers are looking at molten-salt reactor technologies but no significant money has been spent, same with fast-spectrum reactors like the Russian BN-series designs which at least exist in the real world. They're not building any molten-salt reactors, they have no plans to build such a reactor, there are no components for such a reactor being ordered or manufactured. There is some theoretical research and computer modelling being carried out, that's all. The only experimental reactor they're actually spending money on building is a pebble-bed design, the HTR-PM.
The Oak Ridge molten-salt reactor never used thorium, ever. It ran with U-233 and later with U-235 but never thorium. I blame the Powerpoint Rangers for conflating the purely theoretical LFTR with the Oak Ridge reactor (which was only one of many possible reactor concepts being tried out back in the 1960s).
> fossil carbon emissions would also shrink by 82-86% below their 2000 levels despite the assumed 2.58-fold bigger economy than in 2010.
So even if we assume EVERYTHING can be three times more efficient (good luck) AND we ignore the costs of trying to a accomplish that, STILL 15% of total energy can't come from renewables. And this is assuming renewable technology that doesn't actually exist, so it's really not an option right now, is it? Maybe it'll be available in 2050, but if we don't do anything until 2050 we'll be fucked by then. We need to act now. For that 15% (actually 85%) do you want fossil fuels or clean nuclear? Because those are the two choices. Maybe in 40 years we'll have other choices too.
Funny how double standards are sort of the staple of the U.S. lately.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Will we need to do the same for the storage sites.