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Belgium's Aging Nuclear Plants Worry Neighbors (phys.org)
mdsolar writes with news that Belgium's decision to restart a reactor at its Tihange nuclear power plant and its aging Doel plant have some of its European neighbors uneasy. Phys.org reports: "As the two cooling towers at Belgium's Doel nuclear power belch thick white steam into a wintry sky, people over the border in the Dutch town of Nieuw-Namen are on edge. They are part of a groundswell of concern in the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg over the safety of Belgium's seven aging reactors at Doel and at Tihange, further to the south and east. 'I'm happy Holland, Germany and Luxembourg are reacting because they (officials) don't listen to you and me,' butcher Filip van Vlierberge told AFP at his shop in Nieuw-Namen, where people can see the Doel plant. Benedicte, one of his customers, nodded in agreement. Van Vlierberge said he was particularly uneasy with the Belgian government's decision in December to extend the lives of 40-year-old reactors Doel 1 and Doel 2 until 2025 under a deal to preserve jobs and invest in the transition to cleaner energy."
The reason is that after the referendum back around 1980 there was effectively a ban on all nuclear power research in Sweden.
That has effectively caused the situation we have where the upgrades of the reactors have been limited.
That said - the nuclear reactor technology is mostly a dead end because nuclear energy is very dirty - mines contaminating areas with radioactivity for millenia, mining and refining costing a lot of energy - producing CO2 in the process and post usage waste from the fuel and from the reactors when they are torn down.
It's just the power plants themselves that are reasonably clean unless there's an accident (Fukushima, Chernobyl, Kyshtym, Harrisburg, Sellafield)
Nuclear power is useful in special applications, but due to the long term effects of it if there's a problem it's not a good solution.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Exactlly: but that dissolving is met with fierce resistance from the French-speaking part of Belgium. Just recently, the leading party (a pro-secession Flemish party that has vowed to delay their already well known secession plans during their appointment in order to get the country back on track) has publicly announced they will look into the confederalistic matter INTERNALLY as a long-term strategy: just to make it clear they do not intend to do it now. ....)
Immediately and will all guns blazing, the French-speaking parties except the Liberal Party talk of nothing short of a revolution in the Belgian Parliament. Of course, every Flemish person understands it is in their best interest to keep Belgium (an artificial country created by the imperial powers of the 19th century) together as they 'think' the fruits of Flemish labour (a.k.a. money transfers from Flemish to Walloon part) is their due payment for the past 2 centuries of pampering those peasant Flemish farmers with their Germanic-based language into the industrial age.
I for one think Europe should be about people in regions with their own culture but under the umbrella of a bigger organisation (EU) but without the blooper-government (Greece, Merkel-Migrants,
For reactors being torn down, yes it takes energy. But given that we should know how to make plants last 50 years at this point, minimum, it's not actually that big of a proportion. Hell, after 50 years you'll probably be replacing the solar panels as well.
The energy expenditure for *one* reactor decommissioning is around the 30-70TWh range [citing Vattenfal *and* Storm for lower and upper ranges] so with 400 odd reactors around the world we have a roughly 2800TWh energy *debt* pending from existing nuclear reactors in the nuclear industry a decade or two after they are decommissioned. An energy debt that will have to be paid by the great grand children of the baby boomers.
On nuclear accidents - I'll give you that the earliest plants are dangerous. Fukushima, for example was older than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Newer plants would be safer.
AP1000 plants have a lower thermal containment ratio (ie, the amount of energy the concrete dome structure can contain) than the installations at Three Mile Island. Additionally AP1000's concrete dome also doubles as a heat exchanger which is not a failure mode that has been tested in anything other than simulations of this type of reactor. So, they maybe newer and more modern, however we won't know for sure if the design changes made are improvements or flawed ideas that can go wrong.
The EPR reactors appear to be a better design over AP1000 for many reason, the most obvious one being a *double* containment building, i.e that massive dome gets *another* structure built over the top of it and main facilities buildings set up so that the whole reactor isn't completely disabled in the event of an emergency. IIRC these are the reactors that Finland is installing.
build new nuclear plants to replace the old ones
I think the economics of building them has really hit the nuclear industry, it's billions of dollars up front and a very long time for any return or value on investment. There is simply better places for money to go. Even if they were built and put online today, none of these new reactor facilities will be producing power for people in 40 to 60 years time because they will be at the end of their service life. The energy debt is to carefully disassemble those reactors so that the toxic elements they contain are captured without being released into the environment.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Disposal of the waste is not as difficult as people pretend,
It's very difficult. Groundwater contaimination is a major issue. Stopping things like plutonium chloride from getting into the water table and finding the right geology to store this is a major challenge for geologists. There is some interesting work going on in tying transuranics up in some crystal types of rocks. The crystals are actually green and quite beautiful. Most importantly, they are impervious to water - so the hope is that it can become an industrial process.
and in fact would be simple and cheap if successive generations of politicians not bowed to NIMBY pressure...
Well NIMBY in the context of these reactors is next to some pretty densly populated cities and many millions of people.
Running older reactors can be perfectly safe too;
How old? Nothing is perfect.
costs a bit more,
How much is 'a bit'?
since you have to model how the materials age and replacement can be tricky, but there are specialists who provide those services.
I don't think so. Neutron bombardment of the reactor vessel, the main component of the reactor, is the main factor that limits the life of a nuclear reactor. These aren't exactly the kinds of thing you can call GE and arrange a feild tech to come out and replace.
Typically 40 years operation is the expected lifespan. Micro cracks and fissures are the type of thing expected to occur at the end of it's service life and it's not cost effective to repair. The reactors are approaching the end of their service life so it might be a good idea to gradually wind it down whilst they bring something else on line.
The concern is that some organisations are moving away from the "safety first, money no object" mentality to squeeze more cash out of their already highly-profitable installations.
That's exactly right. Reactors are at their most dangerous at the begining and at the end of their operational lifespan so it's proably a good idea to keep a close eye on these guys so they don't go taking any stupid risks.
Davis Besse Nuclear Power plant is a good example where management ignored signs the reactor wasn't behaving to specification when water filters had to be replaced more often than was normally required. It turned out to be a very fine jet of borated water was spraying onto the inside of the reactor head creating a hole the size of a football through six inchs of stainless steel. I think criminal charges were pressed against the management.
So if the Belgium authorities are keeping an eye on them, it's probably a good idea.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
ITER is an international effort that happens to be built in France (Japan was the other candidate IIRC). Besides demonstrating a capability to sustain fusion at a significant net energy surplus, it should answer the question of to what degree the reactor vessel will become radioactive, and many other difficult questions as well. Sadly it'll be a while before we'll know more; realistically, ITER won't see first plasma before 2025, and will take years to demonstrate sustained fusion.
Meanwhile, interesting things are happening in Germany. The Wendelstein stellerator has seen first plasma last month and is going operational this year. This thing attempts to solve a number of issues with the classical Tokamak design, and the goals for this reactor are rather ambitious: to sustain plasma for up to 30 minutes.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
One of the rare times where, after many users have provided counterarguments against mdsolar's negative posts in the past, we as a group need to resort to directly attacking the character and motive of all posts by mdsolar.
http://slashdot.org/submission/5458403/20-nations-nuclear-facilities-said-to-be-vulnerable-to-cyberattack
http://slashdot.org/submission/5439281/why-james-hansen-is-wrong-about-nuclear-power
http://slashdot.org/submission/5415059/portions-of-land-at-san-onofre-nuclear-plant-may-be-contaminated-navy
http://slashdot.org/submission/5373577/the-attack-of-the-nuclear-hucksters
Why are we still accepting such biased submissions from mdsolar?
> It is only dangerous radiation if you eat it or breathe it.
That's a bigger risk than people admit, especially over longer timescales. You breathe in dust all the time -- oops, this dust is plutonium-contaminated, and now the alpha emissions are inside your lungs. You pick some wild strawberries to eat on a picnic -- oops, the area is plutonium-contaminated, and now your stomach is getting the alpha emissions.
Sure, right now we have the plutonium-contaminated sites fenced off, but will we keep them fenced off for the next 100 years? The next 1000 years?
The part about nuclear that scares people like me is that dealing with the waste requires really long-term plans. How many programs started by the Roman Republic are still fulfilling their purpose today? For some types of nuclear waste, that's the kind of timeline we need for a management program.
You do make a good point about coal fly ash and mercury, though. Replacing all nuclear plants with coal plants would be a bad idea.