Slashdot Mirror
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...
The country doesn't needs nuclear meltdowns; neither does its power grid. If you shut down power plants, power gets more expensive and other power plants open. If a reactor melts down, not only is the land around it unusable for a while but the irrational public says, "ZOMG! Nuclear!" and you can't open a new nuclear plant for forty years.
If there is a problem, and there's no reason to believe there isn't, it should be fixed now before the height of summer A/C demand. Cooling is an incredible draw on our power supplies and the world is just getting hotter.
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."
Please sign in and post this with your account. If there is to be any hope of the site operators taking action to contain his trolling, enough of us need to complain, and Anonymous Cowards don't count.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
No. The risk is failure of the cooling systems.
An open phase fault means that one of the three power phases has lost voltage. This would not trip over current circuit breakers, and some equipment like motors for pumps and cooling systems may continue to operate, but their performance would be severely degraded, or if stopped may fail to start, even though they appear to have voltage. Under these degraded conditions, motors may be internally damaged by overheating.
Phase loss detection relays are fairly standard for sensitive equipment. In the event of a phase loss or phase with low voltage, all 3 phases are tripped, cutting all power. A backup power supply can then be selected.
Chernobyl had nothing to do with a coolant problem (unless you mean in generic terms that it's coolant system wasn't designed to handle a power excursion in excess of 10 times its rated capacity). While steam voids caused reactor #4 to become extremely unstable, it was the additional graphite moderator located on the bottom of the control rods when they finally decided to shut things down, that caused the reactor to go prompt critical. It went from a few MW of power to 30GW in a fraction of a second. This is what blew the reactor apart, and no coolant system would have made a difference