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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.
Gee, it's mdsolar and his anti-nuclear rants again.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
...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.
Not only that, but the RBMK units at Chernobyl use a positive void coefficient - if there are voids in the coolant, it speeds up the reaction. Thus, a loss of coolant causes a runaway problem. This was one of the MANY problems that stacked up to create the Chernobyl disaster.
Every single licensed commercial reactor in the US uses a negative void coefficient, so if you have a loss of coolant, the reaction shuts down. If you can't get coolant back onto the fuel, you might end up with some melt, but it will stay contained (Three Mile Island) rather than EXPLODING and showering radioactive debris over hundreds of miles.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's safe to ignore calls that the sky is falling, if the person screaming it is indeed Chicken Little. Yes.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.