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NRC Engineers Urge Shutdown of Nuclear Plants If Design Flaw Not Fixed (utilitydive.com)
mdsolar writes: A group of engineers in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission say they have identified a design flaw in nearly all nuclear reactors in the country that should result in their mandatory shutdown unless operators fix the problem, Reuters reports. In late February, the engineers petitioned the NRC to order immediate enforcement actions to correct the design flaw, which they say could result in damage to cooling systems and ultimately lead to an emergency situation. The filing asks the agency to respond by March 21 and is a part of a standard NRC process, according to the news outlet. The filing stems from an incident in January 2012, when Exelon's Byron 2 unit in Illinois experienced an automatic reactor trip from full power after an undervoltage condition was detected. The unit was shut down for a week, in what is known as an open phase condition created by an unbalanced voltage. The NRC engineers say such an event could cause an electrical short, reducing the abilituy of cooling systems to operate.
It's not like the country needs power or anything...
this. They want a disaster since they know it will disproportionately affect the poor.
Why are all these non-stories submitted by mdsolar being approved? They identified a possible flaw and recommended a fix. Nothing to see here, move on.
In short, the catastrophic problems at both Chernobyl and at Fukushima Daiichi, despite different reactor designs, were coolant/steam problems. In Chernobyl's case steam voids within the graphite-moderated core caused the pressure to grow to the point it blew-off the upper biological shield, exposing the reactor core and blowing chunks of it out into the environment. In Fukishima Daiichi's case, as temperatures grew steam formed and also hydrogen and oxygen were separated-out from water, so steam and hydrogen explosions resulted.
Keeping that reactor cooled and preventing the buildup of steam inside of the system should be top priority.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Gee, it's mdsolar and his anti-nuclear rants again.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Unsurprisingly, mdsolar is posting this as soon as possible, because he has a hard on for hating on solar power. They've had a whole 96 hours to think about this. The world is going to end! OMG! They're not doing anything.
I'll just ignore this for a while because, frankly, this is way too early to give a crap.
FWIW, the 2012 incident didn't do anything anyone but a solar panel hugging, nuke hating asshole would care about, either. It will be corrected, but as far as emergencies go, this one isn't one because it has happened 13 times in the past 14 years and... nothing of consequence happened. It will happen one more time before it's fixed and... nothing of consequence will happen. It went unnoticed for several weeks and... nothing of consequence happened.
But, because nuclear safety is taken seriously (unlike employee safety when installing solar panels) this will be corrected quickly and without incident.
Getting in the news for something other than gross political corruption!
g=
Really?
Nuclear accounts for approximately 20% of the power generated in the US. How, pray tell, does the NRC plan to replace this generation capacity?
Oh wait, it's mdsolar, all nuclear is bad and we live in a happy slappy unicorn world where the consequences don't matter. It's a non-story regarding a minor problem that somebody wants to blow out of proportion, because NUCLEAR EVIL.
"Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
The NRC. There existence is dependent on finding 'problems'.
So the bird poop don't get in...
I believe that there may be an issue that needs to be addressed. But the hyperbole? Nah. If this flaw has been around for all this time without being triggered, it's probably overkill to call for such an extreme response. How about maybe a "we need to fix this reasonably soon" reaction instead?
As soon as I saw the word "nuclear" in the subject, I knew who the submitter was.
For those new around here, mdsolar is Slashdot's long-time anti-unclear troll, so I'm posting this as a forewarning to you. His posting history shows he regularly contributes anti-nuclear articles, and when he gets told, he typically resorts to personal attacks on those he disagrees with. If you're not interested in going down this path, the best option is just to ignore him. As they say: don't feed the trolls. Now if we could only get the powers-that-be here to ignore his submissions...
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
...and it's apparently a standard in all of the nuclear reactors in the country, only one of which had one single event. Which didn't do any actual damage.
Yeah, I'm going to go with "this isn't that big of a problem in reality" for $1000, Alex.
The same blog notes a continuing problem with slack operations at the Springfield plant. Because of its hiring of two-dimensional yellow employees with diminished concern about safety and a poor diet, closure of the local Lard Lad franchise and alcoholism awareness training for all employees was recommended. Video of high-level waste being accidentally brought home in an employee's car and being tossed out onto a public street when discovered was submitted to the NRC in evidence.
All it needs is the coolant to fail and if it's not turned off in time, it's a meltdown.
And it needs to be turned off in a VERY short time indeed. Given the general incompetence and greed of the owners (as opposed to the operators who will go all Homer Simpson Green if it fucks up), this is not an unlikely occurence. Likely enough that in several events, it will be too late in one of them.
And your grid doesn't want GW power stations shutting off in minutes even more than it doesn't need them all shut down before there's an emergency, because at least if it's shut down before the emergency, there's time to plan how to deal with the energy shortfall.
Since TFA cites "NRC engineers" without actually linking to any NRC source material, here's an actual source (PDF warning):
http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1405/ML14057A433.pdf
Relevant quote: "Approximately 8 minutes after the reactor trip, the control room operators diagnosed the loss of Phase C condition and manually tripped breakers to separate the unit buses from the offsite power source. When the operators opened the SAT feeder breakers to the two 4.16-kV ESF buses, the loss of ESF bus voltage resulted in the emergency diesel generators (EDGs) automatically starting and restoring power to the ESF buses. In the event that the operators failed to diagnose the condition in a timely manner, a potential damage to the RCP seals due to loss of seal cooling water may have resulted in a loss-of-coolant event within a few more minutes."
So, if the operators didn't do their jobs, there might have been a larger problem. Given that the NRC prescribed additional safety measures in this nearly two year old report, I do not see anything that makes TFA's hysteria at all appropriate.
their nuclear power plant designs do not have this problem.
Allowing idiots to marshal public sentiment and essentially destroy the nuclear power industry in the US. Had this not been allowed to happen, most of these plants would be gone and we'd be on to newer, safer generations of power plants by now.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Over reaction, maybe a problem, but how long as these nuclear plants been open? Shut them down when they doing the actual fix.
Or this is just a group trying to shut down nuclear power and don't f**king care of the consequences, like stupid Democrat groups would.
The only time it did actually cause a problem, safety systems did exactly as they were designed to.
Nuclear power is still the safest and by far cleanest of our current on demand power generation systems.
Be a nuke fanboy as much as you want, or solar or wind, but if you scream about "one true energy" and attack all the others you are evangelizing failure.
I have been on slashdot since I found it back around year 2000. I have seen the good times and bad times: I keep coming back as it is one of my favourite sites. But I was never motivated to register until now. Why? The garbage that mdsolar keeps posting about nuclear OK, scratch that, mod me down as Flamebait for my first post I don't care.
There are a majority it seems on slashdot in favour of nuclear power and the potential it has to alleviate the amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere. Yet rarely have I seen a pro nuclear article on slashdot. Yes we humans have changed the world. But it is not recent, we have been doing this for at least 12000 years or longer (start of the last great extinction event surely caused by natural climate change and us hunting). We manipulate and take advantage of nearby resources to improve our lives and ensure the survival of our offspring. Our society progresses, life spans get longer, overall life quality improves, we get smarter as a society. This is the cycle of human improvement. Nuclear is a viable option for electricity generation and is a part of that cycle. Energy needs are always increasing and nothing scales quite like nuclear. Expensive to design/construct yes. But fuel is literally dirt cheap. The major cost in maintaining a nuclear reactor is manpower: Training, operations, maintenance, engineering, support, but it still produces plentiful cheap baseload power that solar and wind cannot and that it does not pollute the environment like coal or natural gas does, and has capability to increase baseload that hydro cannot (most major sources of hydro have already been tapped).
I work in the nuclear industry, in the control room. My finger is literally on the keys, monitoring for any problems, issues, deviations from normal and we take appropriate action. If that means shutting down the reactor I do it. There is always a new engineering issue that crops up and we deal with it, we make it safer every time. The margins of safety always increase. The fact that there is yet another post about an issue with a nuclear plant only proves the point that the problem identified is being dealt with, not swept under the rug like in other industries. The nuclear industry is a learning one, we take the lessons from that past and improve our performance.
You are never going to see another Chernobyl, what they did was just crazy. Three mile island? we've learned from that, we have procedures in place, we have training in place, we believe what our instruments are telling us and we take action to deal with the anomaly. Fukushima? yeah we've learned about the vulnerabilities with that too and made improvements to deal with a total station blackout. It would be great if we could get new designs approved that are failsafe but since the climate in North America for nuclear is cold, we deal with the old designs. They really do work well.
The earthquake/tsunami resulted in ~16,000 deaths. The nuclear "disaster" hasn't even produced 100, you fucking nigger imbecile.
If Obama wanted to shut down the nukes how come there are 4 new reactors being built and a 5th completed right now?
This thread addresses the actual issue.
Thoughtful
You'd report it and the electrician's permits and licences would be revoked and all past work inspected. This is a mind bogglingly stupid error.
An ad hom attack is not unexpected. As your frist post is a bit of a new low though.
With that many eyes on the lookout for good news perhaps the only reason they can't find any is because there is none. This certainly isn't news about how they fixed this issue.
It's fairer to say that Nuclear power offsets the costs of improving our lives onto our offspring who are forced to deal with the waste and decommissioned reactors.
Decreasingly so as a lot more of these plants reach the end of their service life, however it will certainly have a lasting impact.
And an appeal to authority in the first post. I'm sure you are of the highest integrity, but the industry you work in has made a habit of lying and being untrustworthy. Paid and unpaid shills are plentiful and anyone else is treated with the disdain you have demonstrated.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
So, the control rods jammed and boron was used on an emergency basis. But control rods shouldn't jam ever. We keep nuclear power super inefficient just to avoid that kind of thing.
This situation is a risk of damage to the cooling equipment, which, if damaged, would lead to a meltdown, with or without boron. Not the same since cooling is the last line of defense.
Nuclear power does great in military propulsion at sea. It does very poorly in civilian electric generation. As we've seen, it produces catastrophic accidents, produces waste that we don't know how to manage, and is very much more expensive than anything else. But at sea, it may solve even more logistics issues going forward, strongly enhancing national security.
http://science.slashdot.org/st... The trouble is, you like civilian nuclear power generation, and that is all kinds of broken. Nuclear technology is great, essential in some applications, but is stinks in civilian power generation.
You are nothing like the airline industry who actually is a learning industry. You've learned how to PR spin and do the absolute minimum you have to do. You do the same arrogant dismissal of people's concerns and treat them like they are stupid. Fukushima proved the Nuclear Industry learned nothing from Chernobyl except how to better cover evidence and ensure the flow of information is stifled.
I used to support nuclear power, I thought it would save the world and the more I learned and asked questions the more I got labelled as "anti" unclear power.
Indeed it is this very conceit that you demonstrate that is cited in the Official report on the Fukushima accident as a key reason why Japan's unclear industry "managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl" and "how it became accepted practice to resist regulatory pressure and cover up small-scale accidents" like we see here.
The last thing it says about this conceited attitude is: "It was this mindset that led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. "
The attitude you display, as a professional, is no different and is a clear demonstration that the only thing you've learned from Fukushima is to point fingers and say "Not our problem".
The vulnerabilities at the Fukushima reactors were well know for decades before and GE issued procedures for ensuring that those situations would not arise for that generation reactor. The operators did not take sufficient measures to protect the reactor or the community around it.
Everything that happened in that accident was predicted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers from an un- fuelled pressure test of that generation reactor because it was those results that led GE to devise those condition to mitigate the basis design issues that they uncovered. Those factors were not taken seriously enough by TEPCO and that is what led to the accident.
When Nuclear power fails you people claim that no one dies whilst it obliterates communities. Fukushima province was destroyed by a Tsunami however the reason it's people can't return *home* and rebuild is because a nuclear reactor spewed radioactive isotopes all over the place where that community used to exist. The same thing happened at Chernobyl.
But you guys can never take responsibility for anything, minimize everything, attack anyone who has their own concerns no matter how valid and no one has any choice but to accept that unclear power is there.
They may work well. What we have learned is that human organizational systems are not mature enough to handle nuclear power safely. Commercial reactors that are operated by for profit operators have demonstrated an unwillingness to pay for safety to be maintained.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Why was this announced before it was fixed? Are they trying to make it enticing to saboteurs?