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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.
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.
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.
Doesn't sound like it's a major design flaw; they just have to detect an open phase condition more quickly, or provide an alternative power source to the emergency cooling pumps.
One of the few happy lessons from Fukushima is that defense-in-depth works -- at least to prevent mishaps from developing into the worst possible scenario. So we shouldn't be cavalier about the potential loss of one of our layers of protection.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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."
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
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.
Some risks aren't work taking. I'm not a nuclear engineer, and can't speak directly to the issue here. However, if a nuclear engineer intimate with the details speaks up in such a manner, and especially if a group of them do, you'd damn well better pay attention. Engineers don't use hyperbole. If they say this is a problem that merits shutting down reactors it does.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once